New Husband. Old One Gone novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Second Wedding

Those were the longest three minutes of my life, and I've waited on a hull test with a buyer standing over me.

The timer went off.

I turned the stick over.

Two pink lines.

I sat down on the edge of the tub.

I read the box again, in case the instructions had changed.

They hadn't.

I don't remember going down the stairs.

I remember the iron doors standing open, and the morning light on the heart pine.

Sawyer sat at a folding table with a clipboard, across from a woman in pearls.

"Ro?" he said. "We're just going over the..."

He saw my face.

Then he saw what was in my hand.

The clipboard hit the floor.

The woman in pearls looked from him to me to the stick.

"I'll call you Monday," she said, and picked up her purse, and let herself out.

Sawyer came across the ballroom.

He stopped in front of me.

"Is that..."

"Yes."

"Both lines?"

"Both lines, Pickard."

He put his hands on either side of my face.

His eyes were wet already.

"Are you happy?" he said. "Tell me true. Don't be brave about it."

I thought about it. Honestly.

"I'm terrified," I said. "And I'm so happy I could throw up."

He laughed, and it cracked in the middle, and he picked me up right off the floor and spun me around under the bulbs.

We told Mama at Sunday dinner.

She dropped a whole bowl of butter beans.

Then she sat down in her chair and cried, and then she got up and made Sawyer eat two.

We got married on the second Saturday in October.

On purpose.

I picked every single thing.

No church downtown. No hotel. No first look.

The ceremony was on the Pickard dock at high water, four-ten in the afternoon, with the river right up to the boards.

Granddad read the tide table first, standing up out of his lawn chair for it, which he hadn't done for anybody in years.

"High water, four-ten p.m. Small craft advisory."

"There is not," I said.

"There is," Granddad said. "Wear a life jacket."

The whole dock laughed.

The guests sat on folding chairs on the lawn between the yard and the Pickard house.

The crew and their wives.

The yard hands.

The nurse whose wedding we'd saved, and her mother in a green dress.

Three of the Gold Star mothers from the front row.

Corey was an usher.

He had on his navy suit and a yellow rosebud.

He walked every single guest to a chair on his arm, cane on the other side, very serious.

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