Chapter 24: A Year on the Green

A year later, the Harvest Moon came up orange over the river, and I was wearing the same pale dress.

Gillian had pinned the back of it.

She did it with her tongue between her teeth and her forearms floured to the elbow, because she had come straight from the diner.

"Hold still," she said. "You're shaking."

"I'm happy."

"You're shaking happily. It still makes the pins slide."

"Is it true?" I said. "What if the Moon knows?"

"Mira." She jabbed the last pin home. "Tell me one thing in the world that man has done all year that wasn't true."

I thought about it.

I thought about the morning he asked me, in April, in the third row of the orchard.

He had knelt in the mud with the garnet ring held out on his open palm.

He had asked me properly, and then he had waited for the answer while I made him squirm.

I said yes before he fainted.

"Nothing," I said.

"Then stop it."

Out on the green, four hundred lanterns were lit.

I walked out into them with Martha on my arm, and nobody said a word.

Then somebody started to clap, and it went around the whole circle.

The woman in the green dress was in the front row, with her chin up and a lantern in each hand.

The man who had said Orson was unfit took off his hat as I passed.

On a bench by the war memorial sat a woman in a grey coat and gloves.

Martha had tucked a plaid blanket over her knees.

Odile Draper looked at me and inclined her head.

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