Chapter 24: Wedding, With Cake

The second wedding had a seating chart, and I wrote it.

Two hundred chairs went on the lawn, and the head table went under the lights, and at it I put the people who had been owed a seat the longest.

Six families sat there, in their best clothes, with their hands in their laps.

The first bride's mother had come in a green coat.

She was small and gray, and she had held my hand for a long time in the receiving line without saying anything.

Then she had said, "She laughed at everything, you know. Even at the end, I think."

"I'm so sorry," I said. It was the only thing I had ever said that I couldn't put a price on.

"Eat the cake," she said, and patted my wrist.

The chair beside hers had a place card for the seventh bride, the one who fell off the paver.

Her family sat there too.

Her sister had asked, very politely, whether I was the girl from the hedge.

I had said yes.

She said her sister would have found it funny, and she wanted me to know that.

I did not write anything down.

The ledger hung in the entrance hall in a gold frame, and it had taken three guards to hang it level.

Dottie wore a peach dress and a sash that read MAID OF HONOR, which she had made herself.

Frankie had been appointed officiant by the council after a very close vote.

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