Chapter 23: The Wedding

We got married on Saturday afternoon in the yard of our new house, under a barn roof that was half a tarp.

Fifty-one people sat on folding chairs in the grass.

Fifty of them worked for Margot, and the fifty-first was a cardiologist in a rented tie.

Margot's answer to the employees had gone out that morning.

She had said yes, and when she told them at the gate they had cheered so loudly the neighbour's dog started barking.

Millie stood beside me in a navy dress and her work boots.

"Do I have to give a speech?" she said.

"You said you wanted to."

"I wrote four pages."

"Then give the short one."

"This is the short one," Millie said, and unfolded a sheet.

She read it from the start.

It had a joke about pie and a joke about the router.

It had a long, true paragraph about the day I said no to carrying the bags.

By the end half the chairs were crying.

Millie folded the paper and glared at the lawn.

"That's all," she said. "Be good to him."

"I will," Margot said from the aisle.

She had come out of the house on the cardiologist's arm.

Her dress was cream, plain, and cut at the collarbone, and the scar showed.

Nobody had lent her a thing.

She walked down the grass with the wooden ring on her finger.

She stopped across from me, and for a moment neither of us could speak.

The officiant was a man from her company who had gotten ordained on his phone.

"Nolan," he said. "You wrote your own vows?"

"I did."

I took her hands.

"Margot, I've made you dinner for six years," I said. "I want to keep doing it, because I like it."

A few people laughed.

"For six years I never asked you to stay," I said.

"I thought that was a way of loving you. It wasn't. It was a way of being afraid."

Her eyes were wet.

"So here it is, in front of everybody. Stay. Stay home with me. Not because anything makes you. Because you want to."

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