Replacing Four Grooms in One Day novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Two O'Clock Ferry

The drawbridge is up, so Vin takes a skiff in a life vest with a cake in her arms, crosses a gangway with her eyes shut, and marries Knox on the deck as the ferry pulls out, while three men in tuxedos run onto the pier.

The tugboat took its time.

It was 1:43, and the bridge would stay up for twelve minutes, and the pier was on the other side of it.

I got out of the car with my train over one arm and counted the cars stopped behind us.

Nobody honked. They were looking at the dress.

My phone rang, and it was Alana, sounding bright.

"Honey, are you at the bridge?" she said. "Knox says to go down to the seawall on the left. There's a skiff."

"A skiff is a boat," I said.

"It's a very small boat, honey. It's the quickest way across."

"I don't do boats."

"He's holding the gangway chain," Alana said. "He says it sails at two, and he doesn't wait."

In the background a man said, flatly, "I'm waiting."

That was Knox Lacroix, my Number Four, who had said yes at a sandwich shop before I finished the question.

I looked at Gran.

Gran was already out of the car, with her cane and a sugar rose in her hand.

"Your grandfather's house, Vinnie," she said.

I opened the back door and slid the cake board out from over my life vest.

The life vest was still in its bag, with the tag on. I bit the tag off, and put it on over the lace of my bodice.

It was the first time I had ever worn it, and it was the best twenty-nine dollars I have ever spent.

The skiff was tied at the foot of the seawall steps, with a deckhand in a yellow slicker holding it against the pilings.

Gran stepped in first, with her cane.

"I haven't been in a rowboat since 1971," she said.

"It isn't a rowboat," the deckhand said. "It has an outboard."

I stood on the last dry step with the cake board in both arms and my eyes shut.

"You can open them," the deckhand said.

"I can't," I said. "Hand me the rail."

He put my hand on the rail, and I stepped over the gap with my eyes closed, and the whole boat moved under my shoe.

The step came first.

Then the wake of the tugboat hit us in the middle of the creek and sent the cake board sliding toward my chest.

I held it with both arms and said, "Gran, tell me what you see."

"A pelican," Gran said. "A very fat one. Now there's a second."

Then the deckhand cut the engine and said, "That's us," and I opened my eyes and the pier was thirty feet away.

It was 1:58.

A ferry sat at the end of it, white with a blue stripe, and a man in a black tuxedo stood at the gangway with one hand on the chain.

He had dark curls and weathered hands, and he was looking at his watch with no hurry at all.

A blonde woman in a headset ran down the pier toward us.

"There she is!" Alana said. "Oh, honey. The dress! The vest! Give me the cake."

She took the cake from me, and hugged me with one arm, and I let her.

"Two o'clock," Knox said, to nobody. "I don't wait."

I climbed up the pier ladder with Gran's hand on my elbow.

"You're wearing a life vest," Knox said.

"It's my vest," I said. "It goes with the dress."

He didn't smile.

"The chain stays up until two," he said. "It's 1:59. Can you walk a plank?"

"Not with my eyes open."

"Then close them," he said, and held out his arm.

The plank was narrow and tilted, and there was water under it, I could hear it, flat and slapping.

Knox walked me across with his hand over mine.

"Nobody else is going to fall," he said quietly. "I've done this nine hundred times."

"With brides?"

"With commuters."

The deck moved under my shoes, and at precisely two o'clock the engine under it began to hum.

I opened my eyes. The lines were coming off the pier, and the pier was getting smaller.

"Your sister said Venue Four was tied up at the dock," I said.

"It is at the dock," Knox said. "For about a minute."

Alana, from the galley door, put a thumb up.

The harbor chaplain read the whole ceremony standing at the rail, with his book open against the wind.

He had twelve minutes, and he used eleven.

Alana handed us two rings from a drawer in the galley. "The spare set," she said. "They fit everyone."

They fit us.

"Do you, Lavinia," the chaplain said, and I said, "I do," and Knox said, "I do," before the chaplain had finished his sentence.

Gran signed the license on the lid of the cake box, with her spare glasses on.

"Your grandfather would have liked the ferry," she said.

It was 2:11, and I was married, and I was on deep water for the first time since I was a child.

I turned to look back at the pier, because I wanted to see land.

Three men in black tuxedos were running onto it, with flowers.

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