Free Wedding Bell Blues by Ruth Moose Page B

Not like all the real real stuff I had at the Dixie Dew that my grandfather Buie had made and some sentimental pieces that had been passed around in the family. Nothing elegant, just old. I never saw the rest of the Mosses’ rooms but I could imagine the decor.
    Malinda and I had to admit Scott had a point about the festival. Green beans were not sexy, but that was all Littleboro had. No peaches, no plums, not even any vineyards. And there were already a couple of vineyard celebrations, the toasting of the grape going on around the state. Ida Plum had been to some, and could talk about “the tasting of the grape.” But green beans? Kale would have had more appeal. Kale has a lovely leaf and I could think of a lot of ways to cook and eat kale. I could think of some artsy-craftsy things to do with leaves of kale. Stitch them together to make a sort of sun hat. Or a cloche. Roll them into beads, dip in wallpaper paste, let dry, string for jewelry. Spray with Krylon and decorate a wreath for doors. Spray gold, make a fan. But green beans? I wasn’t even close to any craft ideas.
    â€œBeans,” Ida Plum had said. “We’ll be the laughingstock of festivals. Beating out even Miss Liver Mush over in Shelby.”
    â€œNot in my book,” I said. “I’ve only tasted liver mush once in my life and that was the last time.” I shook my shoulders in a shudder. “Yuck. I’d take a bean over liver mush any day and time. And fields of green beans instead of acres of hog farms like they have in Smithfield.”
    I had to admit our honorable mayor was a cut above most of the women in Littleboro. For example, she wore shoes with kitten heels every day, not just to church, and shopped at Talbot’s—and places of the same expensive conservative ilk or above—in Raleigh. She had come to grace our village when I was living in Maine, and I didn’t know exactly where she came from or when. She’d done the ribbon cutting (pink, of course) when I opened The Pink Pineapple Tea and Thee here in the Dixie Dew. Class. I needed some class and she added it. Got us on the front page of The Littleboro Messenger. Not that I had crowds breaking down the doors in the days or weeks afterwards. She did take some of my business cards and said she’d pass them out whenever she could. I’d take all the good publicity available out there anywhere. Dark, gray, bad stuff had seemed to hover over the Dixie Dew at times. First my grandmother’s fatal fall, then Miss Lavinia Lovingood in my Azalea Room the second day the Dixie Dew was open for business.
    Ida Plum wiped the counter and said, “Scott is building some new freestanding booths for the festival. Those old ones at the fairgrounds rotted away years ago.”
    I hoped he was building better “convenience facilities.” I couldn’t remember the last time I went to a fair in Littleboro. Did we still have a county fair? When I was growing up it wasn’t much, a flimsy Ferris wheel, couple of spinning rides, church booths selling hot dogs and some displays of big pumpkins, watermelons, things that got blue ribbons. And the homemaking arts. All those jams and jellies and food canned in jars that had been sterilized in oversized pressure cookers. I remembered seeing gleaming jars of perfect green beans arranged like art and wearing fat blue ribbons.
    I remembered, too, the county fair was the first time I’d ever seen an outhouse. This one was a two-seater: had two holes cut side by side in the sitting place. I remembered pointing to it with Mama Alice, who laughed, which made me laugh.
    I told Ida Plum about this. She said what was funny was calling them convenience facilities. “Why not call an outhouse an outhouse? You call a horse a horse, not a cow. What are we doing to the language these days? Of course our mayor doesn’t want a lot of those little plastic tents set up all over the place for