Chapter 24: Wherever I Go

We did it in June, on the dock, at six in the evening.

Nobody was invited who hadn't been told the truth first.

Molly stood on the shore side in a green dress, holding a bouquet of wild lupine she'd picked that morning and hadn't stopped fussing over.

My mother sat on a folding chair at the end of the boards in her good blue coat, with her hands clasped.

Margaret came in a car she drove herself.

She wore navy silk and pearls, and she stood a little apart with her chin high, until Kendra came up beside her and offered her arm.

Margaret looked at it for a moment.

Then she took it.

Harold sat in the chair my mother had saved him, with his cane across his knees and a blanket he'd stopped arguing about.

Behind him the lake lay flat and gold, and the loon was out past the buoy.

There was no officiant.

There was no music except the water against the posts.

I'd bought a plain cream dress at a shop on Main Street, and I had my grandmother's gray cardigan over it, because the evening was cool.

Nathan stood at the end of the dock in a suit he hadn't worn since the Founders' Dinner.

He looked tired and happy, with a new line at the corner of his mouth.

I walked toward him over the boards he'd fixed in the storm.

Every plank was solid.

I stopped a yard away.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi."

"You're not smiling."

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