Chapter 32: First Snow

"You're kneeling where you died," I said.

"I know." He looked up at me. "It seemed like the right spot."

"I asked you in front of two hundred wolves," he said. "You made me stand up."

"You deserved it."

"I did." He took my right hand, the one with his mother's ring on it. "So here it is, with nobody watching."

"Marry me again. Down the hill from here, in front of your town."

"In her dress, mended. With Arne walking you all the way, not twelve feet."

"And this time you say the words because you want to, not because the moon's coming up."

I looked at him on my mother's linoleum, the King of the Northshore, with his knee in a patch of morning sun.

"When?" I said.

"First snow."

"That could be next week."

"Then it's next week."

"Yes," I said.

His shoulders dropped.

Then I made him get up, because the coffee was getting cold.

The first snow came eleven days later, on a Wednesday.

It started at noon, big wet flakes coming in off the lake, and by four the courtyard at Greywater was white.

By five the private road was full of cars.

The whole volunteer crew in their department jackets.

The chief, and his tiny mother on her cane.

The woman from the bakery with three sheet cakes in her back seat.

The fisherman with the paid-off boat, in a suit that didn't fit him anymore.

And Arne's old blue truck, with the old woman from room twelve in the cab in her feather hat.

Their kids met the cars and walked the town people up the steps, very serious, holding their hands.

I watched it all from the window of the bride's room in the east wing.

The woman with the gray braid had taken my mother's dress home for a week.

She'd sewn the torn shoulder so you couldn't find the seam.

She'd soaked the lake mud out of the hem and sewn on new covered buttons.

"Stand still," she said around her pins. "You're bouncing."

Tove sat on the bed in a green dress with her nose ring polished, eating a cookie from the town's tray.

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