Chapter 47: A Real Ceremony

The field above the harbor was Ginny's idea, and she had paid for it with a year of bar tips.

It was the last Saturday in April.

The grass was green to my ankles, and the wind came up from the water smelling of salt and new rain.

Someone had strung lights between four fence posts, and a hundred folding chairs stood in rows facing the sea.

I stood behind a stand of gorse in Edie's ivory dress, let out twice at the seams by a woman at the bridal shop who had refused to charge me.

I was eight months pregnant and could not see my shoes.

"Stop fidgeting," said Bree.

She wore a pale green dress and carried a bouquet of wildflowers, and she had been crying since seven.

"I'm not fidgeting."

"You're doing the thing with your ring."

I looked down.

I was turning Edie's garnet on my right hand, round and round.

I let go of it.

"Everybody's here," Bree whispered. "Everybody. Willa, there are two hundred people. The beagle man brought a casserole."

"Of course he did."

"And the deputy. She's in a dress," Bree said.

"What kind of dress?"

"The kind with a gun in the purse."

I laughed, and the baby kicked.

"Don't do that," I told my stomach. "Not yet. Hold still."

The music started.

It was not a quartet or a recording.

It was forty bikers, in black suits over their vests, singing "Amazing Grace" badly, with the gray-bearded man conducting with a crab mallet.

Ginny, in a purple pantsuit, sat in the front row and wept openly into a bar towel.

"Go," whispered Bree.

I walked out of the gorse into the light.

The aisle was a long strip of grass between the chairs, and halfway down it a one-eyed dog was waiting.

He wore a small black bow tie.

A velvet pouch hung from his collar, and he looked at me, sighed, and fell into step at my left hip.

"Good boy," I whispered.

A man in the third row said, "That is the best dog I have ever seen," and was shushed.

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