Money, Guns, and a Merry Christmas novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Mill Road

It wasn't a big ring.

That was the first thing I noticed, and I loved him for it before I'd even looked properly.

It was a thin white-gold band with one small, very clear stone, set low so it wouldn't catch on anything.

"It'll fit under a work glove," he said from the floor. "I checked with your foreman."

My foreman, behind me, said, "He did."

"Alana Lawler," Bennet said. "You asked me on that bench. I'm asking you on your floor, in front of your people."

He held it up.

"Marry me again. For real this time. In your grandmother's living room, where the clock is."

Sixty people held their breath.

"What do I get?" I said.

"Christmas dinner," he said. "Every year."

"That's it?"

"Is the cooking good?"

I started crying and laughing at the same time.

"Yes," I said. "Yes, you idiot. Get up."

He got up and put it on my finger, above his mother's band, and the lobby came apart around us.

We got married again on the last Saturday in January.

There was a foot of snow on Mill Road, and the plow had come through at dawn because the man in the Santa hat's son drove it.

My grandmother's living room held thirty people if nobody breathed.

We fit forty.

My foreman and his wife.

The store owner from Main Street, who'd put my scopes back in his case on the second of January with a hand-lettered sign that said LOCAL GLASS.

My receptionist, still crying.

The neighbor from across the road, in a hat.

Bennet's head of security, standing by the front window in a black suit, looking at the road.

The pastor stood in front of the fireplace with his little book.

On the mantel above him, my grandfather's clock ticked.

Celine sat on the stairs with her phone in her lap, turned off.

She'd asked me that morning if she could take one picture after.

"One," I'd said.

"One," she'd agreed, and she hadn't touched the phone since.

Deena was at the back.

She'd come in last, in a plain navy dress, and she hadn't taken a seat.

There was one folding chair left by the coat hooks.

She looked at it for a long second.

Then she sat on it, by herself, with her hands in her lap.

Nobody had told her to.

I came down the stairs in my mother's ivory dress, which my grandmother had kept in a box in the attic for eight years.

It fit everywhere except the hem, and Celine had taken the hem up for me the night before at the kitchen table without saying a word.

My grandmother was waiting at the bottom step in her burgundy dress and her mother's pearls.

She took my arm.

"Your father would have walked you," she said.

"I know."

"So I'm walking you for both of us. Try not to step on me."

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