The Colonel Gave My Wedding to His Sick Sister novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Porch at Midnight

Gran takes Ginny in, and at midnight Ansel brings roses and a deal. He slips and says she will not take 'her' from him, and then a text shows he and Livia were already married on Tuesday.

Gran's farmhouse sat at the end of a gravel road two miles past the post gate, and she was on the porch before Kirk's car stopped.

She was seventy-nine, five feet tall, and holding a cast-iron skillet.

"I heard," she said. "Half the county heard. Get in here."

Kirk carried my bag up the steps, set it inside the door, and stayed on the porch with his cap in his hands.

"Ma'am, I'll have a patrol car at the end of your road tonight," he said.

"A patrol car," Gran said, "for a girl whose own father threw her out in front of a church."

"Yes, ma'am," Kirk said. "Good night, Miss Phelps."

He drove away.

Gran gave me a pair of her old flannel pajamas and a bowl of tomato soup and did not ask me one question.

I sat at her kitchen table in my own bare feet, with a general's coat hanging on the chair behind me.

My hands were steady.

That scared me more than if they had shaken.

"They'll want to take the coat back," I said.

"Let them come get it," Gran said.

At ten I lay down in my father's old bedroom under a quilt that smelled of cedar.

I lay there with my eyes open until the clock downstairs struck twelve.

At twelve fifteen, headlights swung across the ceiling.

A car door shut, softly.

I got up and went to the window.

Ansel was standing in the yard in a dark civilian jacket with a bouquet of white roses.

He looked up, saw me, and lifted one hand.

Gran was already at the foot of the stairs with her skillet.

"Let me talk to him," I said.

"Then I'm standing in the doorway."

She stood in the doorway.

Ansel climbed the porch steps slowly and set the roses on the rail.

His eyes were wet.

"Gin, I am so sorry," he said. "I handled everything wrong. I was scared."

I said nothing.

"Livia's doctors told us in March that she might not have another good year. She asked me for one photo in a dress. One."

"I'm not asking you to forgive the coffee," he said, and he lowered his voice. "A friend gave me a mild pill. It was supposed to let you rest. I was an idiot."

"You were an idiot," I said.

"I was." He took one step closer. "Let me fix it. I'll have the whole wedding done again in spring, for you, with everything you want."

"All I need is a signed statement that you agreed to Livia standing in for the photos and took the pill for your nerves."

"Then the general drops the investigation, and nobody gets hurt."

I looked at his face in the porch light.

It was the face I had kissed at the airport when he came home from Poland.

"You gave me a sedative," I said, "and then you stood in a church and told three hundred people I was crazy."

"That was Livia's heart. I panicked."

"You said sweetheart to her."

He did not answer.

"On your knees beside her on the church floor, you said sweetheart. She's my sister. She's twenty-four years old, and you have known her since she was seven."

Gran's skillet shifted in her hand with a small clink.

Ansel's jaw moved.

When he spoke again, the soft voice was gone.

"Do you know what an assault complaint does to a colonel's file?" he said. "Do you know who sits on my promotion board?"

"I know what a drugged woman does to it."

"You will not take her from me."

He heard it as he said it.

I watched him hear it.

For a second he stood very still with his mouth a little open.

"Take who from you?" I said.

"Your sister," he said quickly. "Your sister's health. You'll kill her with a trial."

"Get off my grandmother's porch."

"Ginny."

"Now," Gran said, and she lifted the skillet one inch.

Ansel looked at the two of us, a retired schoolteacher and a woman in flannel pajamas.

He took a breath, fixed his face, and picked the roses up off the rail.

"You'll come around," he said gently. "Everyone does."

Then he went down the steps, got into his car, and drove away with the headlights off until he reached the road.

Gran locked the door and checked it twice.

"That man has never once been afraid of you," she said. "Tonight he was."

"He said take her from me," I said. "Not take Livia's health. Her."

"Yes. I heard it."

My phone buzzed on the hall table.

It was a text from a second-grade teacher at the post school, a woman I ate lunch with every day.

There was no message, only a photo of a screen.

It was the county clerk's public marriage record.

The names were Ansel Drummond and Livia Phelps.

The date was Tuesday, at ten fifteen in the morning.

I had been at school with twenty-six eight-year-olds at the time.

The church wedding had not been a wedding at all, because they were already married.

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