Chapter 24: The Wedding Car

St. Brendan's held forty people on the second Saturday, and every one of them had been invited.

The pews that had once held three hundred guests were mostly empty.

Jo sat in the front row in a green dress she had bought herself, holding her phone in her lap with the screen turned off, which she said was a gift.

The contractor sat behind her with his wife.

The old man who bought single light bulbs had brought a flower from his window box and put it, without explanation, on the end of my pew.

I wore the plain ivory gown with the long lace sleeves.

I had unpicked the forty buttons and sewn on twelve.

"It was a ridiculous number of buttons," I told my father in the vestibule.

"It was," he said. "Your mother would have loved it."

He wore the one suit he owned, and his hands were not quite steady on my arm.

The limousine stood at the curb behind us with its white ribbon snapping in the wind.

It had brought us the whole way from Thames Street.

I had ridden in the back seat with my father and no one else, and nobody had asked me to move over.

The organ began.

My father squeezed my arm once.

"Ready?"

"No," I said. "Let's go anyway."

We walked.

I did not look at the pews.

I looked straight down the aisle, and it was exactly as long as I remembered it.

At the very end, under the plain stained-glass window, stood a tall man in a dark suit with gray at his temples.

He was already standing.

He had been standing, I understood, since before the doors opened.

He did not move, because he didn't need to, and because if he had moved I think he would have run.

Halfway down the aisle my father let go of my arm and gave me a small push.

I went the rest of the way alone.

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