Oops, Wrong Bride? Fine. No Wedding. novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Sign

I was at the foot of the ladder before I knew I'd moved.

"Stop," I said. "Please. Stop."

The man with the crowbar looked down at me.

He was about sixty, gray mustache, sweat dripping off his nose.

"Ma'am, I've got a work order."

"It says dumpster?"

"Says remove and dispose."

"Then it's trash," I said. "And I'm buying it."

Shelby came off the doorstep.

"No, you're not. It's on my building."

"You just said it was going in the dumpster." I dug in the back pocket of my jeans. "Is the dumpster yours too?"

I had three hundred and forty dollars in cash from Saturday's walk-ups. A fat fold of twenties.

I held it up to the man on the ladder.

He looked at the money. He looked at Shelby. He looked at the sign under his crowbar.

Green and gold letters, a little faded. Sweetgrass. And under them, a tiny hand-painted bee my mother had added the day I was born.

"My mother painted it," I said. "That bee's me."

The man sighed through his mustache.

"Lady said dispose," he said, and came down two rungs and took my money. "I'm disposing it to you."

"You can't do that!" Shelby said.

"Ma'am," he said politely, "I'm done arguing with Gatlings for one day."

The two of them got the sign off the wall without cracking it.

It was six feet long and heavier than it looked.

Hayes took one end and I took the other, and we walked it down King Street in the middle of the morning, through the traffic, to the truck.

A taxi stopped to let us cross. The driver leaned out his window.

"That the Sweetgrass sign?"

"Yes, sir."

"My wife's going to cry," he said. "She bought our wedding cake there in nineteen ninety-eight."

We laid it in the truck bed on a moving blanket.

I didn't look back at Shelby once.

By the afternoon it hung on the long wall of the sail loft, over the steel table, where the light came through the boards in stripes.

Emmy stood under it with her hands on her hips and cried.

"Biscuit," she said to the dog. "Look. Look what Mama did."

"Your mama did nothing," I said. "Hayes's crew did all the bolts."

"I emotionally supported the bolts."

The crew went home at six. Emmy went home at eight, after making me eat half a sandwich standing up.

Hayes stayed.

He sat on the steel table under the sign with a rag and a can of furniture oil, rubbing it into the wood very carefully, the way he worked on his boats.

I lay on the old mattress I'd hauled up the stairs the first week and watched him.

The creek was black outside the long window. The shrimp boats were tied up at the docks with their lights off.

"My father said Mama never knew," I said.

He kept rubbing the wood.

"Do you believe him?"

"No." I stared at the ceiling. "She used to go into the pantry and shut the door. I thought she was counting flour."

"Liza."

"Every September."

He set down the rag.

He came over and lay down on the mattress beside me in his work clothes, on his side, his head propped on his hand.

"You want to talk about it?"

"No."

"You want me to go?"

"No."

"What do you want?"

I turned my head and looked at him.

His scarred eyebrow. His gray eyes. The oil on his fingers.

"I want to not think," I said. "For about two hours. Can you do that?"

He smiled, slowly. The one that took over his whole face.

"Two hours," he said. "I'll aim for three."

He rolled toward me and reached for the button of my jeans.

I caught his wrist.

"My way first."

His eyebrows went up.

"Your way."

I sat up and pushed him onto his back.

Then I climbed over him, one knee on either side of his hips, and looked down.

The lamp was behind me.

Half his face was lit, the other half shadow, and his eyes were on mine, still and gray.

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