Oops, Wrong Bride? Fine. No Wedding. novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: No Veil

Hayes lifted his head off the pillow.

"No veil," he said. "What else?"

"No aisle. No church. No hundred and sixty people." I held my hand up to the window and watched the ring catch the yard light. "Nobody walking me anywhere."

"Okay."

"No ballroom. No band. No father-daughter dance."

"Okay."

"And I read every line of the license before anybody signs it."

He laughed into my hair.

"Yes, ma'am," he said. "When?"

"The first Tuesday they've got."

The first Tuesday they had was the last one in September.

I got married in jeans.

Clean ones, at least, and a white cotton blouse, and my mother's pearls. Seventy-nine of them, every one knotted in silk.

Hayes wore a blue work shirt Emmy had ironed herself, under protest, and his good boots.

The county office was a beige room with a flag and a fake ficus.

One ceiling tile had a water stain shaped like Florida.

There were nine of us in that little room.

Emmy cried before we'd even sat down, with Biscuit on a leash in a bow tie.

The four men from the yard held their ball caps in clean T-shirts.

The register girl had begged for the morning off.

Shelby's mother sat in her navy church dress with a handkerchief she'd hemmed herself.

Mrs. Mattox came in at five past, out of breath, in linen.

"I wasn't invited," she said.

"You're here, though," Hayes said.

She sat down in a plastic chair at the back and folded her hands in her lap.

The clerk was a tired woman in reading glasses with a cup of coffee and a stack of forms.

She slid the license across the counter.

I picked it up and read it. Every line.

The date. The county seal. The names.

Liza Gatling. Hayes Mattox.

Nobody else's name anywhere on it.

"It's right," I said, and handed it back.

The clerk looked at me over her glasses.

"Honey, I've done this nine thousand times. Nobody's ever checked."

"I got burned once," I said.

There was no aisle.

I just walked from the counter to the spot in front of the flag, holding Hayes's hand, on my own two feet.

Nobody gave me away. Nobody had me to give.

The clerk read the words off a laminated card.

Hayes said "I do" before she'd finished the question, and the whole room laughed.

Then it was my turn.

I looked at him. The scar through his eyebrow. The gray eyes. The sawdust he'd somehow missed in his beard, even today.

Nobody stood behind me.

Nobody tore anything off my head.

"I do," I said.

"Then by the power vested in me by the state of South Carolina," the clerk said, and took a sip of her coffee, "you're married. Go on, kiss him. I've got a two o'clock."

He kissed me in front of the fake ficus.

Emmy screamed, and the crew stamped their boots on the linoleum.

We had the cake on the dock.

My mother's lemon cake, four layers, on a sawhorse table at the end of Hayes's dock with the creek going by underneath.

Emmy had piped it herself while I wasn't allowed to look.

When she took the lid off the box, the whole dock read it at once.

Right bride.

Hayes laughed so hard he had to hold onto the piling.

The shrimp boats came home past us at four, and every captain blew his horn.

The oldest of the crew had called each one on the radio and told them to.

Halfway through the afternoon, the register girl handed me a small white box.

"Somebody left it at the bakery," she said. "No name."

Inside sat one lemon square.

A little lopsided. The crust too dark at one corner.

I knew the handwriting on the napkin under it. I'd known it since we were five.

"Made it myself. From scratch."

I ate it standing on the dock.

It wasn't my mother's.

It wasn't bad, either.

I folded the napkin into my pocket and didn't say anything to anyone.

Shelby's mother watched me from her folding chair and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth.

By dark everybody had gone home.

Hayes took my hand and walked me up the outside stairs to the sail loft.

The ovens and the steel table were gone to King Street.

Where my mother's sign had hung, the boards showed a clean bare rectangle.

The old mattress was still on the floor under the long window.

Somebody, probably Emmy, had made it up with a clean white sheet and scattered magnolia petals over it.

"Where we started," Hayes said.

"Where I started," I said. "You started at the far end of a dinner table."

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