by Connor Mccoy
“I think it’s a good deal, Dan,” Joe said. “But I won’t do it unless you come too.”
“That’s blackmail, Joe,” Daniel said, but he was smiling. “I can see another reason to join. I had no idea there were so many nice looking women in this city.”
Melvin looked to where Daniel was and saw Sally talking to a few other young women. Perhaps she was recruiting too. “That’s Sally, she lives in the museum already. She works in the clinic helping the doc.”
“Is she attached?” Joe asked.
“I’m not sure,” Melvin said, “but I don’t think so. She spends a lot of time with the doctor, but as far as I know, it’s just a friendship. He’s a little mature for her. Even if she is attached, it looks like she’s got friends.”
“Yeah, we’re in,” Daniel said. “I’m done getting cut for a living. But I want my own room. I’m too old to be sharing with my brother.”
Melvin smiled. “I think we can manage that,” he said. “Why don’t you gather up any belongings you want to bring and meet me back at the museum. Come to the clinic door, and Robbie will let you in.”
Melvin said goodbye and wandered over to Sally, who just had walked away from the young women she’d been talking to.
“Recruiting?” he asked her.
“Sort of,” Sally said. “They have their own place with heat and water, so they don’t need to move in. But they want to be part of the community. None of us realized that there were so many people our own age. We’ve all been so insular, afraid of mingling with other groups, but now you can’t throw a stick without finding another potential friend. They are so excited about being part of something bigger.”
“I’m finding that too. Did you notice the Chief Justice from the Court joined us?” he asked.
“I did. She’s got balls. I’d be terrified that the people would turn on me if I did what she did. But I guess not that many people will recognize her. And if Glen was willing to give her a chance, then I am.” She smiled. “I’m really going to miss Arthur, but I’m glad you are still with us, Melvin.”
“Me too. He was an exceptional man. But I think you’ll find that there are a lot of men your age agreeing to be part of this community too. You may find a partner now.” He looked for signs that she might accept this possibility.
“Maybe,” she said, and took his arm, leading him back toward the museum, “but I’m not looking for romance right now. I think it’s more important that we get this community up and running. We need to keep people alive and fed before I think about becoming a pair with anyone.”
“That’s an intelligent idea,” Melvin said. “And you really should get to know people over a span of time before you make that kind of decision.”
“I’m going to ask Anthony to come to visit us here,” she said. “He knows what needs to be done to keep people safe. Maybe he would stay for a while.”
“Anthony would be a real asset,” Melvin said. “But do you think he’d want to stay in the city? He seems like such a country kind of guy.”
“I don’t know, but there’s only one way to find out. I’ll ask him to come. I can’t do more than that. I smell dinner. I’m starving, aren’t you? All this work makes me so hungry.” She started to skip down the alley, more like a child than a woman in the fading light.
Melvin followed. It was funny how she’d transformed from a highly competent doctor’s assistant into a young woman again. Was it the removal of the threat of the Cut Court? Or was it Arthur’s death? He’d have to ask Glen to keep an eye on her. What they needed was a psychologist to join them. Someone to make sure they weren’t being sent over the edge by the stresses of this new world.
But probably all the psychologists were holed up somewhere with the rich, the medical specialists, and who knew who else, leaving the populace to fend for themselves. He’d keep an eye out, though. There had to be one or two decent head shrinkers who would join their community. He followed Sally into dinner thinking about the people who make up a community and how to attract the kind of people who would bring about positive change.
They were a subdued group at dinner. The food was good after a long day of hard work, but the loss of Arthur was too close and had hit them hard. It would take a while before they recovered emotionally, but they would, and not in the least because Arthur would want them to do so.
Chapter Nineteen
Ten months later, Glen walked among the raised beds in the early morning looking for Mia. There was a bounty of vegetables growing throughout the park, but he knew that he would find her among the flowers. The flowers had been a point of contention in the community. There were those who felt every available inch of growing space should be used for food. But in the end, when they couldn’t make a case for the care and feeding of the soul, Mia and Sally had sold the idea of flowers attracting beneficial insects.
Sally even had broken into the library and brought back reference books on companion planting. In the end, the community agreed to a few beds of flowers, which the women then had augmented by digging up the overgrown grass between the sidewalk and the road and planting flowers there as well.
Glen’s instincts proved correct. He found Mia cutting flowers in the raised beds. She smiled when she saw him.
“I wish peonies grew all summer,” she said. “They’d make a perfect bouquet.”
“I bet you could find roses if you biked over to the Ford house,” Glen said. “Or at Belle Isle.”
“I’ve gone off roses,” Mia said. “And I’m afraid if I went to all that trouble they’d just wilt before this evening anyway.” She showed him the flowers in her bucket. “I’m doing daisies and black-eyed Susans. It’ll be cheerful.”
“Tell me what I can do to help,” he said. “I know my job is to get Christian to the Arthur Davis building on time, but that’s hours away. What can I do now?”
“Relax and enjoy the day off,” Mia said. “We’ve got so much help it’s ridiculous. Robbie’s crew raided one of the local schools for folding chairs, and they’ve set them up already. Sally filled the fountain/fire pit with flowers. Everything is clean and tidy. I can’t think of a better place to get married.”
“And you help build it, which has to make it even more special,” Glen said.
“It’s amazing isn’t it?” Mia asked. “It seemed such a dark and dingy building over the winter, when so many people gathered there to stay warm. But when we requested that people remove their belongings and toss the trash, all of a sudden we have a bright and cheerful space. Anyone would be happy to get married here.”
“It’s fitting that you are the first,” Glen said. “There wouldn’t be a community center if it weren’t for you.”
“I’m sure someone else would have thought of it if I hadn’t,” Mia said. She added a few bunches of a blue flower, Glen thought they might be lupins, to her bucket.”
“But you pushed for it. You kept everyone working when they wanted to leave it for the winter. I’m pretty confident it wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for you.”
“I’m perfectly happy to accept compliments on my wedding day,” she said, “but it was more than just me. A huge team of people made that happen. Did you need me for something? I’m heading back to the house now. I’ve got to make these into a bouquet.”
“I just came to ask if there is anything for me to do,” he said. “I’ll walk back with you.”
They walked past a vegetable patch that had a wire fence and squash growing, suspended in nylon stockings. “Whose idea was it to suspend the zucchini squash?” he asked.
“One of the young guys,” she said. “He read about it in a book. If you slide nylons on your squash, the bugs don’t eat them. And if you hang them, they don’t get flat spots where they rest on the ground. Pretty ingenious.”
“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” Glen broke in. “You don’t have to get married when you love someone.”
“Marriage is a pillar of society,” Mia said. “Or at least we th
ink so. Of course, we could remain unmarried and still be committed to each other, but the ceremony announces our commitment to society as a whole. It shows our neighbors that we believe in the institutions that hold society together. And that will encourage others to believe as well. We are helping to create a more stable community.”
Glen thought about that for a moment. “You believe that marriage will help stabilize the community?” he asked.
“Yes. It says we are planning to stick together regardless of what happens. That we won’t run away when we come up against adversity. Marriage says this publicly, the ceremony celebrates that commitment. It’s a positive move,” Mia said. “And it shows our faith in this community.”
“I never thought of it like that,” he said. “But I think you are right. It puts your relationship into a larger context. It gives a certain solidity to your presence here. I wasn’t thinking of it like that.”
“Before the big dark came,” Mia said, “I would have said marriage wasn’t for me, because it seemed like a vestige of the idea of women and children as property. There would have been no need for me to marry. Things have changed.”
“And you still want me to give you away?” he asked. “You haven’t changed your mind?”
“There’s no one more appropriate than you, Glen,” she said. “If it weren’t for you, I don’t believe Christian, Sally, and I would have survived. But don’t think of it as giving me away, it’s more like standing next to me, supporting me in my choice to join with Christian. As part of my chosen family group.”
Glen wondered at this. How had he become part of a chosen family group? He’d vowed to leave all family ties behind, never to forge new ones because of the pain of losing his wife and son. And yet here he was, part of a family group he never asked for. As far as he knew, he’d done nothing toward forging those bonds.
“I’m your family?” he asked.
“Of course you are our family,” she said, her voice echoing her surprise. “You saved us. You stitched up Christian. You took us in. At any point, you could have sent us away, and you would have been justified to do so. But you didn’t. You just kept giving us chances to be the better humans you knew we could be. You inspired us.”
“Tell me about the bear,” he said quietly. This was a story he’d wondered about for over two years now.
“We baited the bear,” Mia said. “The plan was to arrive at your door with the bear chasing us so you’d have to let us in. Only I tripped, and the bear was almost on top of me when Christian stepped between us. It swiped at Christian with its paw – you saw the damage -- and Sally grabbed a branch and started beating it and yelling, swearing really, at the top of her lungs. The bear decided we weren’t worth the trouble and ran away. Then we had to hope you could help Christian when we’d been planning to rob and kill you. We were so stupid.”
“And here we are, family.” Glen smiled. “Thank you for telling me. I’ve been wondering how that happened. Don’t let it cloud your day, we all were different people back then.” He put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her close. “That was before we knew what an organizational whiz you are.”
“And I can design a mean community center.” She grinned. “I’d better get something to eat. Don’t want to be fainting at the altar.”
He gave Mia another squeeze, and they walked in through the clinic, the place that had become the heartbeat of their lives.
Chantal watched from the balcony as Mia and Glen walked down the driveway to the back of the building. She usually still lived in her high-rise apartment, but had accepted the invitation to stay at the museum for the weekend. Over the past few months, she’d found the courage to let it be known who she was. It only was fair that the people here know who they were dealing with. And there was always the nagging fear that someone else would out her if she did not do it herself.
And they had accepted her. They looked at what she’d done for the community, and they had taken her in as a valued asset. Her eyes still teared up when she thought of it. She had gone from being a feared tyrant to a trusted servant. She had become a sort of spiritual advisor, only in a more secular sense. Moral was a better word for it. People came to ask what the moral course of action was when they were unsure. She was honored.
Mia and Christian asked if she would officiate their wedding. There was no need for it, they could have married themselves if they had wanted. There still was no rule of law to bind them. But they’d asked her, and she’d been honored and had accepted. It was as easy as that.
Now she stood at the parapet with her coffee. She liked the balcony. It was almost like her view from her apartment, only closer to the world. It was a more intimate view, where faces were visible and facial expressions could be read. She wondered what Glen and Mia had been talking about. Mia had looked too unhappy for a moment, and then her face had bloomed into a smile again.
Chantal took a last look across the park that had been so dramatically transformed. A long one-and-a-half story building occupied the center of the park where the fountain used to be. In actuality, the fountain still was there, but it had been transformed into a fire pit for the winter. The flames burned uninterrupted for months. As the weather warmed into summer, the wood, ash and soot was cleaned from the tiles, which having been created to withstand extreme temperatures, showed very little evidence of the misuse they had suffered during the winter.
Chantal knew that today the basin would be filled with flowers, and if they could get the solar panels to work, it may yet again be a working fountain for the summer. It made her happy that they had gone beyond thinking of just survival and that art and beauty were also relevant. After enjoying Arthur’s painting over the winter months, she had donated it to the community center, and it now hung on the wall opposite the entrance on the far side of the fountain.
She was content with her decision to share that painting with the world. Arthur would have approved of it being shared, and if she wanted to look at it, she only had a short walk from downtown. And viewing it at the community center had the added benefit of bringing her into contact with people. She almost always ended up in conversation when she came down to the park.
But today she had a purpose beyond her usual role as mentor and group leader. She would perform her first wedding ever, and more important than that, the first wedding that she knew of since the lights went out. It would be a celebration like no other, and she needed to make sure that she performed her part flawlessly. She would go down to the quiet courtyard and review her notes on the ceremony and rehearse so that Mia and Christian could rely on her to direct them. They were bound to be too anxious to remember everything themselves.
That evening, Glen stood in the lofty entrance hall of the museum, which they’d never used before. Today, he would escort Mia out the front door, directly across the street and through the park to the community center where she would be married. He was glad they had decided to open the front for this purpose. It was fitting.
He heard muffled giggles from upstairs, and then Mia and her attendants descended the main stairs. Her dress was made of a million strips of frayed fabric so that it looked like feathers as it floated around her. It had taken the entire winter to create, various women coming in to help as they could, working by candlelight and LEDs. It was worth it, he thought, watching her float down the stairs, surrounded by her friends.
They took turns kissing her cheeks before dashing out the door and across to the park. All except Sally, dressed in a dusty rose dress, who held Mia’s hands and waited with her. Music floated to them across the grass, and the three of them walked together across the lawn, to the notes of some lost song played by guitar and flute. It was almost melancholy, but with just enough lightness to be appropriate for escorting a bride to her groom.
Sally walked down the aisle between the chairs, which were filled to capacity, to Christian and Anthony, who were opposite the fountain of flowers. Chantal stood behind them on a low stage made of wooden pallets. Ev
en Glen had to admit they had performed miracles, transforming the work-a-day room into an enchanted bower. Sally took Anthony’s hand, and she smiled as she watched Glen escort Mia to her new life with Christian.
The wedding was brief, which was okay with Glen. He did not give the bride away, but escorted her to her new life. He didn’t remember the exact words, he only knew that his heart was full when he spoke his line and that he had to brush a tear away once he was seated. When the vows had been exchanged Sally and Antony led the couple back down the aisle and out into the park where the party would be held.
There was the usual, music and dance, but also circus performers and storytellers, meat roasting over pits and a clown creating balloon hats for everyone. It was a carnival of light and sound, dancing, and laughter. More than just a celebration of Mia and Christian’s wedding, it was a tribute to their first four seasons together as a community. Of the triumphs and the losses.
Glen sat on the edge of one of the planters near an open area where the married couple sat under a medieval-style tent. They were the king and queen of the evening, their heads crowned by balloon hats and young girls serving them food and drink. Mia was laughing, her eyes bright and happy. Christian looked as noble as a king of old, gracious and charming to everyone.
Anthony and Sally came to sit near Glen, holding hands and smiling happily into each other’s eyes.
“Will you be able to function without me?” Sally asked. “When I go back to New Town?”
“You couldn’t get Anthony to stay here with us?” Glen asked, half joking. He knew she felt more at home in the little town.
“He would if I asked him,” she said. “But I won’t. He has family there, and friends. He’ll probably be mayor one day.”
“I don’t want to be mayor,” Anthony said. “But New Town is my home.”
“I won’t lie,” Glen said. “I will miss you. And so will Mia and Christian, and probably Melvin too. But we’ll be able to function. The medical clinic will thrive. Now that we have nurses, and doctors and orderlies coming out of the woodwork we’ll never be understaffed again. But it will be different. I’m pretty sure none of them can read my mind the way you do.”