He Scored My Life A 4 And Hers A 10 novel · Chapter 32 of 32
Chapter 32: The Apparatus Bay
The cake, it turned out, was chocolate on the outside and purple on the inside.
"Like a geode," Mabel explained to the baker on Kinnickinnic. "You cut it open and it's a surprise."
The baker wrote it down very seriously.
We set the date for Saturday, January 9.
One year to the day.
"That's either beautiful or deranged," Ronnie said.
"It's both," I said. "Same as you."
It snowed all morning.
By three o'clock the B shift had pulled Med 14 and Engine 14 out of the apparatus bay onto the apron.
They sat side by side in the falling snow with their lights turning slowly, red and white, for no emergency at all.
Inside, the bay was warm and swept and strung with white lights.
There were folding chairs from the church next door, in rows, with an aisle down the middle.
On the back wall, where the hoses usually hung, the B shift had hung my grandmother's quilt.
Green and white. Double wedding ring.
I stood in the side door and looked at it for a long time before anyone saw me.
My dress was plain and white and came to my knees.
You could see the scar on my right shin.
I didn't cover it.
The chairs filled up.
The night crew from Lakeshore, all of them, even the ones on shift, who'd traded to come for one hour.
The B shift in dress blues.
The academy class, twenty-two of them, in a block in the back.
The Waiting Room Club. Thirty-one families now, with the widow in the front row in a navy dress and her husband's parka over it.
The man from section 324, in his red cap, with his wife.
The interim president, who wasn't interim anymore.
Jesse's mother, in a corsage the size of a cabbage.
Ronnie stood at the front in her good fleece vest.
She'd gotten ordained online in October. She'd been unbearable about it ever since.
The big guy with the mustache started the music on a speaker by the engine's empty spot.
Mabel went first.
She was the flower girl, except she'd refused flowers.
She walked down the aisle in a green dress and her puffy green coat, dropping small smooth lake pebbles from a bucket, one every step.
Everybody laughed.
She ignored them and kept dropping.
At the front, she handed the bucket to Ronnie and stood next to her dad with her arms folded.
Then it was my turn.
I walked by myself.
Nobody gave me away.
Jesse stood at the front in his dress blues with his lieutenant's bars, under my grandmother's quilt.
He watched me the whole way down the aisle.
By the time I got to him his eyes were wet, and he didn't wipe them.
"Hey, Wardlow," he said, very quietly.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of He Scored My Life A 4 And Hers A 10 are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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