The Whole Valley Called Her the Plain Fiancee, So She Let the Banquet Read the Deed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
At the Harvest Banquet Helene Wheelwright toasts the scale-house girl as a local touch for the brand, and Signe walks up the aisle and puts the Touchet water deed on the projector.
At the microphone, my fiance's mother called me "a sweet girl from the scale house, a local touch for the brand."
Three hundred people in the hotel ballroom smiled at their wine glasses.
A man at a back table laughed out loud.
I sat at the head table in my mother's green dress, with her round tortoiseshell glasses on a chain against my collarbone.
I had put them on that morning for luck.
I had never worn the dress anywhere but my own bedroom.
"To my son and his fiancee," Helene Wheelwright said, and lifted her glass.
Rhys Wheelwright sat on my left with his eyes on the back wall.
In three weeks of being engaged to him, he had not touched my hand.
He had not touched it at the farm, or at the lawyer's, or on the steps of this hotel an hour ago, when the photographer asked him to.
He had said, "No," and the photographer had taken my picture alone.
At the next table down, a woman in pearls leaned toward her husband and did not bother to whisper.
"The Wheelwright boy is slumming."
"That's the Aldahl girl," her husband said. "The one who weighs the trucks."
"She couldn't tell a Bordeaux from a boxed red," the woman said.
"She'd weigh them both," he said, and they laughed.
I heard every word.
My father had told me to stay home.
He had said it twice, in the kitchen, with his big hands flat on the table.
I had told him I wanted to see what they would say when they thought I couldn't hear.
Now I knew.
Helene waited for the applause to settle.
"Signe has been so good about all of this," she said, and smiled down at me.
"We're going to find her something useful to do at Wheelwright Cellars."
More laughter, softer, the kind that is a kindness to the person laughing.
I looked at Rhys.
He was thirty-four, with a clean-shaven, exact face and gray eyes that had not once turned my way.
His jaw was set so tight I could see the muscle jump.
He raised his glass with the rest of them.
That was when I stood up.
My chair scraped on the parquet.
"Signe, dear, there's no need for this," Helene said.
I walked down the three steps from the head table.
I walked up the center aisle between the round tables, past the pearls and the dark suits and the faces of every grower who had ever backed a truck onto my scale.
Nobody said a word.
I could hear my mother's shoes on the floor, because they were my shoes now, and a half size too big.
At the lectern, Helene held the microphone in one hand and a folded card in the other.
I took the microphone out of her fingers with both of mine.
She let go, because she was too surprised to hold on.
"Thank you, Mrs. Wheelwright," I said.
My voice came back to me off the far wall, calm and flat, the voice I use to call a weight.
"Before anyone drinks to the wedding, I'd like to tell you who is actually paying for the toast."
The ballroom had a projector and a big white screen behind the lectern.
I had asked the hotel's technician for the cable at four o'clock that afternoon.
I took my phone out of the pocket of my mother's dress and laid it on the lectern.
I touched the screen, and the picture rose up behind me ten feet wide.
It was a photograph of a recorded document, with the county seal in the corner.
The title block was clear enough to read from the back of the room.
Surface Water Right, Touchet River, Walla Walla County.
Below it, in black type, was the name of the holder: Signe Marit Aldahl.
The grower at the nearest table read it aloud under his breath.
"The Touchet right."
His wife put her hand over her mouth.
"That's the right that runs every Wheelwright vineyard block," someone said, loud, from the middle of the room.
"Every one," I said into the microphone.
"Forty-one blocks, from the Oregon line to the river bend.
"Every vine they've watered since I was eighteen, they've watered on mine."
Helene's face had gone as white as her suit.
"That is a private matter," she said, low, reaching for the microphone.
I stepped out of her reach.
"It was private," I said.
"You made it public when you called me a local touch."
Somebody at the back dropped a fork.
I turned my head and looked down the length of the ballroom to the head table.
Rhys Wheelwright had finally turned.
For the first time in three weeks, his gray eyes were on my face.
He had gone perfectly still.
"You may sit, Mr. Wheelwright," I said into the microphone.
"I'm not finished."
I did not leave the stage.
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