Forbidden Guest House novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Wedding

"On the internet," I said.

"It's legal. I checked with the county. Twice."

Hedy folded her dish towel.

"I'm not letting some stranger stand up there and say your Gran's name wrong."

Leif put his arm around my waist.

"Third Saturday in June," he said. "I'll be free."

On the third Saturday in June the lilacs came out all at once.

I woke before five in my own room with the window open and the lake flat as a plate.

Leif wasn't there.

Hedy had made him sleep in Room Two, between his father and the old man in the plaid sport coat.

"Tradition," she'd said.

"Whose?"

"Mine. As of now."

By two o'clock there were a hundred and twenty chairs on the lawn in rows down to the water.

The boathouse doors were open, with SOLBERG & MATTSON BOATS over them and a half-built cedar strip canoe on the horses inside.

At the end of the dock, Gran's canoe floated on a rope, filled to the gunwales with lilacs.

The church ladies had cut every bush on the lake road. Nobody complained.

I wore a short white lace dress I'd bought in Duluth, and Gran's pearl studs.

Not pearls like Marlys's. Small ones, the only jewelry Gran ever owned.

Hedy came up to my room at a quarter to two in a lavender suit with a printout in a plastic sleeve.

"Don't cry yet," she said. "I've got mascara on."

She stood behind me in the mirror and fixed one bobby pin I hadn't asked her to.

"She'd have liked this dress," she said.

"Too short."

"She'd have liked it anyway."

At two the schoolteachers' string trio started playing on the porch.

They'd come back from St. Paul for it, and they'd been rehearsing by video since March.

I walked down the porch steps alone.

Nobody gave me away. I'd decided that in October, and Hedy had agreed so fast I knew she'd been hoping.

The whole lawn stood up.

The old woman from table six was in the front row in a hat the size of a tire.

Gran's lawyer was in the second row with his magnifying glass in his breast pocket, in case.

At the end of the aisle, under the birches with Gran's Christmas lights still strung in them, stood Leif.

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