Skipped by the Altar, Taken by His Uncle novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Bluff House

At Earl's eightieth, Corrie wears Rhea's ring on a chain, the mayor on the terrace turns out to know exactly who writes Blaine, and Blaine launches his campaign with her father's eulogy and toasts 'my wife, Rhea.'

Connie drove, because she said I'd steer us into the river on purpose.

The Eckert house sits on the bluff above town.

White columns, a long green lawn, and wooden stairs going all the way down to a private dock.

Every light in it was on.

"Two hundred people," Connie said, parking her hatchback between two Teslas. "And one of them is going to say your dad's words into a microphone."

"Not if I get to him first."

I wore jeans, a white shirt, and my mother's pearl earrings, because they were the only nice thing that hadn't been in Blaine's closet.

Connie wore her camera.

The first person I saw was Corrie.

She stood at the foot of the staircase in a cream dress, greeting people.

Around her neck, on a thin gold chain, hung my engagement ring.

"Sweetie!" She held out both hands. "You came. Blaine said you would."

"Earl invited me."

"Grandpa invites everybody. He's eighty." She touched the ring with one fingertip. "Do you like it? Blaine said it was a shame to waste it."

"It's a size six," I said. "Your neck's bigger than that."

Connie made a noise and pretended to check her lens.

Corrie's smile didn't move, but her eyes went small and hard.

"Enjoy the party, sweetie. Blaine has a surprise for you."

"Everybody keeps saying that."

We went through the house and out onto the terrace.

At the far end, a little stage with a podium and a microphone.

Behind the podium stood a backdrop eight feet tall.

It was a photograph of my father's store.

The brick front of Pritchard Hardware, the old painted sign on the side wall, the brown flood line across the bricks from 2019.

Across the bottom, in navy letters: BLAINE ECKERT FOR MAYOR. A FAMILY MAN FOR A FAMILY TOWN.

I stopped walking.

Connie stopped beside me.

"I'll get the drinks," she said quietly. "Don't kill anybody till I'm back."

She left me at the terrace rail.

"You're Weddings and Milestones," a man said beside me.

I turned.

He was leaning on the rail with a beer he hadn't touched.

Tall, broad, dark hair going gray at the sides, a short beard.

Shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. A watch with a crack across the glass.

I knew him the way you know a water tower. From across rooms.

Reuben Eckert. The mayor. Blaine's uncle.

"And obituaries," I said.

"I know. I read those first."

"Nobody reads those first."

"I do. You give everybody one good sentence. Even the mean ones." He tipped his beer at the river. "The rain-gauge man on Fourth Street. 'Never once wrong about the weather and never once nice about it.'"

I almost laughed. I'd fought my editor for that line.

"You're the opponent," I said.

"Apparently. I found out from the Sunday wrap like everybody else."

"He didn't tell you?"

"Blaine doesn't tell me things. He reads me things." He looked at me sideways. "His speeches got good about four years ago."

The terrace noise went thin around me.

"Did they," I said.

"Before that, he read the phone book at people and called it a vision." He finally drank. "Then one spring, out of nowhere, he started ending on a small thing. A bell. A nail. A coffee can."

I held the rail.

"Lots of people end on a small thing."

"Not in this family." He set the beer down. "In this family, we end on a big number."

Connie came back with two glasses of white wine and stopped short.

"Mayor," she said.

"Ms. Huff. Nice camera."

"Nice watch. It's broken."

"It runs," he said. "It just looks like it's been through something."

The music stopped.

Somebody tapped the microphone, and two hundred heads turned.

Blaine stepped up to the podium in front of my father's store.

Corrie sat on the edge of the stage with her ankles crossed and her phone up, filming.

In a wicker chair down front sat a small, stooped old man with a full head of white hair and a cane across his knees.

Earl Eckert, eighty today, looking at his grandson like a weather report he didn't believe.

"Thank you all for coming," Blaine said. "Happy birthday, Grandpa."

Applause. Earl lifted two fingers off the cane.

Blaine laid a page on the podium.

"There was a man on Front Street who was like a father to me," he began.

I put my glass down on the rail so I wouldn't drop it.

He read the whole thing.

The bell over the door.

The way my father looked up like you were the only customer all week.

The coffee can of loose screws. The flood.

A woman near me cried quietly into a cocktail napkin.

Blaine's voice cracked on the flood, exactly where mine had at the church.

Reuben didn't move beside me. But I felt him look at me, and not at the stage.

"That man taught me what this town is," Blaine said. "And he's why I'm running."

He hadn't said the store's name once.

He hadn't said my father's name once.

The applause came up.

Blaine let it run.

Then he lifted a glass of champagne off the podium and turned, searching the terrace, smiling.

"And none of this would mean anything without the woman who stood by me through all of it."

The spotlight operator swung his light across the crowd.

"To my wife," Blaine said. "Rhea."

The light found me at the rail, and two hundred people turned to look.

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