Skipped by the Altar, Taken by His Uncle novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Weddings and Obituaries

Rhea pulls her own fake wedding notice, hears Blaine proudly read the newsroom her dead father's eulogy as his launch speech, and forbids him to say it, and then a card arrives from his grandfather inviting her to the party.

I was at my desk at seven the next morning, still in yesterday's jeans.

The Courier newsroom is six desks, a coffee maker older than me, and a police scanner nobody turns off.

On Saturdays it's usually just the sports guy and the smell of toner.

That Saturday it was all six of us.

Somebody had told somebody.

I opened the Sunday queue and found it.

"Blaine Eckert and Rhea Pritchard were married Friday at Halbrook City Hall."

Under it, a photo of us on the floodwall last summer. His arm around my waist. My eyes half shut against the sun.

I'd written forty of these this year for other women.

I knew exactly where the delete key was.

"You sure?" my editor said from his doorway.

"I was there," I said. "He wasn't."

I deleted it.

Then I pulled up the obituary queue, because the dead don't care whose fiancé skipped brunch.

Connie came in at seven-thirty with two coffees and a box of glazed doughnuts.

She set one coffee on my desk and one doughnut on my keyboard.

"Eat," she said. "You look like an obituary."

"I write those."

"Then write yourself a better one."

At nine the door opened and the whole room smelled like a funeral home.

Blaine walked in with an armful of white lilies.

Navy suit. No tie. Teeth.

My eyes started watering before he reached my desk.

"Ree." He laid the lilies across my keyboard like a body. "Peace offering."

"I'm allergic to lilies."

"Since when?"

"Since the day we met. You sent me lilies that day too."

The sports guy coughed into his fist.

Blaine laughed, easy, and moved the flowers to Connie's desk.

Connie moved them to the trash.

"Okay," Blaine said. "I get it. You're mad. You're allowed to be mad. But tonight is big, babe, and I need you there."

"I'm not your wife."

"You're my fiancée."

"I dropped your ring in a mimosa."

"Corrie fished it out. It's fine. It's safe." He said it like that should comfort me.

He turned to the room. He always turns to the room.

"You guys want to hear a little of it? The launch speech? I've been practicing all night."

Nobody said yes.

He didn't need anybody to.

He took a folded page out of his breast pocket.

I knew the font before I knew the words. Georgia, twelve point. My font.

"There was a man on Front Street who was like a father to me," Blaine read.

The room went still.

"He had a hardware store with a bell on the door. When the bell rang, he looked up like you were the only customer he'd had all week."

My hands went flat on the desk.

"My mentor taught me that a town is just a lot of people who owe each other a favor."

I'd written that sentence at my kitchen table three years ago, at two in the morning.

My father's reading glasses were still on the counter where he'd left them.

I'd read it out loud at the Methodist church, to a room of folding chairs.

My voice had held until the last line.

Blaine read on.

The bell on the door. The coffee can of loose screws. The flood line on the bricks.

He changed every "my father" into "my mentor" and every "Dad" into "he."

His voice cracked in the same place mine had.

He'd learned that from me, too.

When he finished, he looked up, pleased, waiting.

The sports guy looked at me.

My editor looked at me.

Connie stood up slowly.

"That's her dad," Connie said. "You absolute sewer."

"It's a tribute," Blaine said.

I stood up.

"You will not say those words tonight."

He smiled at me.

"Ree. Come on. You wrote them for me."

"I wrote them for my father."

"And he'd want them heard. A hundred people heard them at the church. Tonight two hundred will. On camera." He tucked the page back over his heart. "That's what he'd want."

"You never met him."

"I met him twice."

"You called him 'the hardware guy.' In the car. Both times."

Somebody laughed and turned it into a sneeze.

Blaine's jaw went tight for one second.

Then the smile came back, and he leaned in close so only I would hear.

"Seven o'clock. I'll send a car. Wear the blue."

"I won't be in it."

"You will." He tapped my desk twice with one finger. "Everybody's going to see you there, babe. One way or another."

He walked out.

The lily smell stayed.

Connie got the trash can and carried it out to the back stairs herself.

I sat down and typed my father's eulogy from memory into a blank file.

I just wanted to see it in my own hands again.

I got to the last line.

"He'd sell you one nail if one nail was all you needed."

Blaine had cut it.

Of course he had. It wasn't about him.

At ten-fifteen the front desk girl brought me an envelope.

Heavy cream paper. My name in fountain pen, in letters that leaned.

"A man in a pickup left it," she said. "He said it was from the boss."

"Which boss?"

"The old one."

I opened it.

It was a birthday invitation with gold edges, EARL ECKERT, 80, printed across the top.

Across the bottom, in the same leaning ink, somebody had written three short lines.

"Obituaries. Come to my party. Bring somebody who isn't my grandson."

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