Chapter 24: The Cake Knife

I got married on Dot's dock, on a Saturday in October, with the boathouse door standing wide open behind me.

There were twenty-two guests, all in folding chairs, and not one of them had come to watch me fail.

The old judge performed the ceremony in his ancient tuxedo, and cried before he got to my name.

Anson had asked me again in a month, exactly as promised.

He had a better line.

I am not going to tell you what it was.

I said yes the second time, and I said it so fast that Dot dropped the casserole.

Now he stood on the boards in front of me, in a plain gray suit.

The ring in his hand was paid for with his first paycheck from a building crew in Harbor Springs.

"You look like you're about to cry," I whispered.

"I'm not crying," he said hoarsely. "I'm looking at a very nice wall."

I laughed out loud, in the middle of my own wedding.

The judge cleared his throat.

"Josephine Alder," he said. "Do you take this man..."

"I do," I said, before he finished.

People laughed.

Dot, in the front row in her wide green coat, was weeping openly into a dish towel.

Tilda sat beside her.

She wore a plain blue dress and no ring.

For a year she had sat in the last chair at every family dinner without once asking me for anything.

She had testified at the trial and looked at my mother the whole time.

My mother had looked at the floor, and the judge had given her fourteen years.

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