Chapter 23: The Real Wedding

On the last Saturday in November, at four in the afternoon, I walked onto the lodge lawn.

It was the third time I had worn the ivory dress.

It was cold and bright.

The lake lay behind the white chairs, blue and hard, and the chairs held sixty people.

My mother sat in the front row in a plum-colored suit she had bought for the occasion.

Beside her sat six nurses from the children's ward, and the old director in the gray tie with his wife.

Four Bexley cousins sat in the second row, looking nervous.

Lowell sat alone at the end of the last row, with his glasses in his hand.

Nobody had asked him.

He had come anyway, and nobody had told him to leave.

I walked the aisle by myself.

I did not need an arm.

Ford stood at the end of it in a dark suit that fit him, for once.

His hair was combed, and his tattooed sleeve showed at the cuff.

He was pale, and his hands would not stay still.

I took my place in front of him.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi," said Ford.

The woman marrying us was a judge from Mecklenburg County.

She said it was the first redo she had ever done.

Then she told Ford it was his turn.

He took a folded paper out of his pocket and put it back.

"I didn't write it down," he said. "I'd lose it."

He looked at me.

"I'm not good at this."

"I've said maybe four hundred words aloud to you since September, and half of them were about rope."

Somebody in the second row laughed.

"I married you the first time with a secret in my pocket."

"I told myself it was spite. I told myself it was a rescue. Neither one was the truth."

His voice went rough, and he kept going.

"The truth is I looked up in a bar and a woman with freckles was drinking alone."

"I'd never seen anybody look so tired and so angry and so alive."

My mother put her hand over her mouth.

"I'll never lie to you again."

"I'll tell you every Sunday what I'm not saying, even if it's small."

"I have a boat and a vote and you, and I put them in the wrong order for a while."

"Ford," I said, laughing.

"You come first," he said, very seriously. "Then the boat. Then the vote."