Cancel the Wedding, Queen Moves On novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Cancelled

At the altar she cancels the wedding in front of 240 guests, shows the clip, and watches the groom's mother try to sweep it away, until the church doors open on a man she has not seen in seven years.

For one second nobody breathed.

Two hundred and forty people looked at a bride holding a microphone.

Preston laughed softly and reached for my hand.

"Etta, sweetheart. Nerves. Give me that."

I stepped back out of his reach.

"I'm going to play you something," I said into the microphone. "It's thirty seconds long."

I took my phone out of the folds of my gown and held it against the microphone's grille.

I pressed play.

The speakers in the old stone ceiling carried it to every pew.

Preston's voice filled the church, fond and unhurried, and it said he was marrying me at noon and going to her tonight.

Someone gasped near the back.

Faye's laugh came out of the ceiling next, warm and delighted.

I watched the heads turn.

They turned toward the maid of honor, standing at my left shoulder in her dusty-rose dress, with her bouquet still in both hands.

Then Preston's laugh filled the church, and his voice said it.

"She tunes pianos, Faye. She hears what she's told."

I stopped the recording.

The silence afterward was the loudest thing I have ever heard in a church.

Faye's face went the color of the candle wax.

"That's not what it sounds like," she said.

It was the only thing she could think of, and it was the dumbest thing she could have said.

"It sounds like two people who have been sleeping together for a while," I said. "I'd guess eleven months, based on the lip gloss."

I pointed at Preston's collar.

A smear of pink sat on the white cotton, a few inches under his chin.

Every guest in the first six rows looked at it.

Preston touched his throat.

His fingers came away with a faint pink streak.

He closed his hand into a fist, and his smile did not move at all.

"She is overwrought," he said to the church, in his warm reasonable voice.

"That recording is edited. Etta has been under tremendous strain since her father's anniversary."

I looked at him.

"You said my father's name," I said. "Be very careful."

Cecily rose from the front pew in her silver gown.

"The organist," she said, quite calmly, to no one. "Please."

The organ coughed and started the processional.

It lasted four notes.

"Stop," said a voice from the third pew, and the organ stopped.

My grandmother Pearl was standing on the pew cushion in a sequin cardigan.

She cupped her hands around her mouth.

"That's my granddaughter's wedding and she says it's cancelled," she bellowed. "Play another note and I'll come up there and take your fingers off."

The organist took his hands off the keys.

Somebody in the back laughed out loud, and then somebody else did.

Then Pearl started to clap.

Slowly, with her whole arms, the way she had clapped at my father's piano recitals, she clapped.

A second pair of hands joined her, an old man in the fifth pew, and a woman in a green hat.

Then twenty more.

Preston looked around at his guests.

I slid the engagement ring off my finger.

It stuck at the knuckle, because I had been wearing it for fourteen months, and I worked it free in front of everyone.

I put it in the breast pocket of Preston's morning coat, next to his folded silk handkerchief.

"Your mother can get the deposit back," I said. "You can keep the rest."

"Etta," he said, very low, and it was not warm anymore. "You will regret this in a week."

"I regret the last two years," I said. "I'm saving the rest of my regret for Faye."

Faye had not moved.

She was crying properly now, with her mascara running into her dimples.

"Etta, please. You don't understand. We never meant."

"You planned my wedding," I said. "You picked my flowers. You chose the song I walked in to."

I held out the microphone, and she flinched.

I only wanted to give it back.

"You can have the mic," I told her. "You always did want the last word."

I turned to the guests.

"There's a lunch for two hundred and forty at the hotel, and it's paid for."

"Please go eat the chicken. I'm sorry to waste your Saturday."

I laid the microphone on the altar rail.

Then I gathered my skirts in both hands and started down the aisle alone.

It was a long way.

I kept my eyes on the doors at the end, to stay upright.

I was ten pews from the back when they opened.

Light came in around a man in the doorway, a very big one, in a grey sweater with a black wool coat over his arm.

He was six feet four, with a shaved head and a thick sandy beard.

There was a white scar through his left eyebrow that I had once kissed.

Seven years had put forty pounds of shoulder on him.

His eyes were the same pale, stubborn blue.

He walked down the aisle toward me without hurrying, with the whole church watching him.

He stopped an arm's length away and held out his coat.

"Etta," Ambrose Keene said. "You're shaking. Take it."

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