by Jan Karon
‘Are we crazy?’
Dooley laughed. ‘Still crazy after all these years.’
‘How many years? I bet you can’t remember.’
‘The first time I saw you,’ he said, ‘you were twelve going on twenty-four.’ His eyes were closed and he was grinning.
‘And you were thirteen. You were wearing a blue shirt with a button-down collar.’ She didn’t remember ever seeing a button-down collar before; she was jealous of his shirt.
He had been a total snot, but she’d never seen anybody as cute and for some reason it made her mad that he was that cute and getting away with it.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The thing about time. How it flies. I thought only old people thought that.’
‘What I can’t believe is, I’m marrying the bratty derp who stole my hat.’
He laughed. ‘And I’m marrying that weird Creek kid who punched me for stealing it. That’s really unbelievable.’
Out there were stars and planets and the dark procession of cedars along the fence line.
He wondered how often they had sat on this wicker glider, talking against the night, against the morning when he or she or both would have to get in the car and drive like a rock star and clock in somewhere else. Hal and Marge had gladly conveyed the beat-up porch furniture with the sale, along with a lot of other stuff he and Lace had grown accustomed to. He liked familiar things, things that had been worn in by good people, people he could trust. This afternoon he had bought back the truck he sold his dad a few years ago. He felt safe in that truck, it was worn in just right.
This was her favorite time. Crickets and stars and the person she would spend the rest of her life with. ‘The pool table is coming out Monday,’ she said.
‘Where are you putting it?’ he said.
‘In the library. Cynthia says she’ll miss having it fill up their entire dining room. Harley will bring the library chairs to my studio, and speaking of chairs, I think we should rent the wood finish, not white. Four hundred and twenty dollars for chairs for the ceremony and supper.’
‘Do it,’ he said. ‘It’s your day.’
‘Our day.’
‘I’ve been thinking about the tent. A guy at school says a tent rental for fifty people at a sit-down would cost twelve hundred bucks, maybe more. Not in our budget.’
‘But if it rains . . .’ Willie pretty much promised rain, a prediction that had made him briefly unpopular.
‘The barn. Tables for ten, end to end, to make one long table down the center aisle. If it rains, the shed will keep it from blowing into the barn.’
‘I love that. It’s perfect.’
‘So we could put the food tables in the grain room, sans mice; we’ll take the door off. And muck out the stalls.’
‘The stalls should be easy; the girls haven’t used them much. I can do that.’
‘Brides don’t muck out stalls,’ he said.
‘But I like doing it, remember? I used to do it when Hal and Marge had horses. It’s very grounding.’
He gave her a thoughtful look. ‘You’re amazing.’
She didn’t feel amazing; she felt worn, somehow. ‘So what about a tent for the ceremony? We need a tent. We can’t just sit out in the open. I mean, we could, but if . . .’
‘If rain’s predicted, we could do the ceremony on the front porch. We can get fifty chairs on the porch. Ten rows five chairs wide. I measured, we can do it.’
Why remind him that rain hardly ever falls straight down, it falls at a slant? But she was stressing too much about these things, she needed to lighten up.
‘It will be a great day,’ he said. ‘Come rain or come shine.’
‘That’s an old-fashioned thing my mother used to say before she got sick. Like, she’d scrub the floor tomorrow, come rain or come shine.’
‘My granpa used to say it, too.’
‘I never hear you talk about him.’
‘He was good to me. He saved my life by dumping me on Dad. If he hadn’t done that, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here tonight. Granpa was too old to do much, and then he was too sick, but he did the best he could while I was with him. He always said, I’m gon’ take care of you, boy, come rain or come shine.’
He’d never thanked his granpa, Russell Jacks, who was sexton at Lord’s Chapel for a lot of years. He’d been too young and too confused to think about thanking. Obviously, it was too late—or maybe, as some liked to think, it was never too late.
‘I’ve been coming out here since I was eleven years old,’ he said. ‘Why am I just now getting it in my head that there’s a lot of work on this place? Nothing ever seemed like work before.’
‘You see the work now because it’s yours.’
‘Ours,’ he said.
‘Imagine those funny girls with their heads sticking over the stall doors while we’re having potluck.’ She laughed, a sudden thing, like a cloudburst. It made her feel herself again.
‘We need to keep them out of the barn till hot weather, when they’ll need the stalls for shade. By the way, keep reminding everybody to shut the big gate after they feed up.’
‘I will.’
‘We haven’t had to close it in a couple of years, so it’s easy to forget. The clinic sign will be ready for us to bring home after graduation. It looks great.’
Everyone who drove the Farmer road would see it hanging on its post in a bed of red and yellow zinnias.
‘I’ll be back on it in two weeks.’ He wouldn’t come home next weekend; he would spend it packing up his stuff, saying goodbye, doing a little partying with friends. Then the gown, the crazy hat, the whole nine yards, and immediately after, he was bustin’ out of the academic world.
‘Doctor Kavanagh!’ She looked at him with a kind of wonder. ‘I can’t believe it.’
He thought there was an awful lot they couldn’t believe these days.
‘Harley, Hal, Marge, and Rebecca Jane, who still adores you, will all be there,’ she said. ‘They’re coming in Hal’s van.’
‘Hal’s van smells like old dogs.’
‘They’ll drive with the windows down.’
They laughed a little, holding each other in this moment that wouldn’t come again.
‘Hoppy and Olivia are driving up from Charleston, where Hoppy is making a speech, and I’ll come with your parents.’
He jiggled his leg; there was too much going on.
‘It would be perfect if all your sibs could come to the wedding,’ she said. ‘I know Kenny and Julie can’t afford to fly from Oregon and bring the kids, but if I could sell . . .’
‘It’s okay. They’ll come later. Kenny has a great job doing what he loves, and it’s not the best time for him to leave, anyway.’
Something about the bridge Kenny was working on and the government funding going sour.
‘Anyway, all the others will be here,’ he said. ‘I talked to Sammy today. He’s in Minnesota. A trick shot competition.’
She could see Sammy hunkered over the pool table with his ponytail and the burning look he had when blowing everybody out of the water. And now he was on cable TV, and winning trophies and making money.
She wished her wedding dress would present itself in her mind as clearly as the image of Sammy breaking a rack. Something soft. Ankle-length. Simple but amazing. That’s all she knew. And the Seven Sisters roses in a bouquet with rosemary, and a satin ribbon the color of Jersey cream . . .
Rebecca Jane was up for catching the bouquet. ‘Throw it to me!’ she had begged. ‘It’s okay that I’ll be a nun and never, ever get married.’
She took his hand and felt the beating of his pulse. They hadn’t really talked about his mother coming to the wedding, and how Sammy would feel about it. Sammy hadn’t seen her since he was six years old—Pauline
had abandoned all but one of her five children when they were really young. But Pauline had changed, of course. Everything about her life had changed, and maybe the wedding would work some miracle for Sammy and his mother. Everybody was praying for that.
‘Inviting her is the right thing to do,’ Dooley had said. ‘Sammy and Mama—that’s their deal, not mine. So there’ll be some tension. There’s always some tension at weddings, right?’ He had been a groomsman more than a few times.
A heifer bawled from the pasture and was quiet again. He wanted to crash on the bed in his room next to the porch and sleep for weeks. But he couldn’t leave her, not yet—their whole history had been about leaving.
‘I wanted to tell him today,’ he said. ‘He mentioned something about . . .’
‘Children.’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t be with you when you tell him. I’ll cry and I don’t want to.’
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘But I can tell Cynthia. Hoppy and Olivia and Hal and Marge have known it for so long, I’ve felt guilty about not telling your parents.’ Dooley had wanted to do it sooner, but couldn’t.
‘So before I leave in the morning,’ he said. ‘It’s really bothering me, I’ve got to do it.’
‘I’ll talk to Cynthia while you talk to him. But we can’t say anything to anybody about Jack Tyler.’
‘I know. It’s too soon.’
He needed to say how much she meant to him, how much he loved and wanted her, but he couldn’t manage to say anything right now. Professor Morgan had called him ‘a lad of few words.’ That wasn’t true. There were words spilling around in him all the time. Too many words. His problem was organizing them.
He had held himself away from her for years until that Christmas at Meadowgate. It had snowed and they had gone out in it with Bowser and Bonemeal and a sled and she was wearing the jacket with the hood and the snow was coming down very fast and he couldn’t believe how beautiful she was, so beautiful in some new way that he felt he didn’t deserve such beauty, it was beyond him. He was struck by the sudden understanding that he could lose her by not loving her enough.
He had gripped her hand and they moved on. He was carrying a weight he couldn’t identify—a heaviness that must be given up.
They had stopped to look over their tracks and across to the farmhouse with its vine of smoke from the kitchen chimney. Something shifted in him then, and he knew without thinking what was about to happen. He was terrified, but didn’t look down. He leaped from one bank of the chasm to the other—and she received him with a tenderness he couldn’t name. He was safe; he was home.
He drew her closer, felt the beating of her heart. A lot of times their hearts beat in different rhythms, but tonight they beat together, a rare thing that had never happened with anyone else.
After breakfast he walked out with his dad and they sat on a bench under the barn shed.
There would be no children for them; they had known it for quite a while. They had processed this truth in several different ways, which took time and emotional energy, and they hadn’t really been ready to talk about it.
Lace had been diagnosed with adhesive disease, caused by infections due to rupture in the abdominal cavity. The problem, which was almost constantly painful, couldn’t be detected by CAT scans or MRI images and for years had been treated as irritable bowel syndrome.
Her father had kicked her twice in the abdomen. ‘The first time,’ said Dooley, ‘she was seven years old. The second time, she was ten.’ She had been frightened by the menstrual blood and the terrible yelling of her father, and her mother hiding beneath the bedcovers.
He said all this as best he could without flying into a rage or breaking down. He had broken down once in a KFC drive-through, once when talking to a professor, and more than a few times with Lace.
Dooley stood and caught his breath. All the telling had been done now; it was nobody else’s business. He felt some of the fury and sorrow lift off and saw that his dad was weeping, and in a gesture in which he felt like the parent, he put his arm around his dad’s shoulders and promised himself this would be the last time he would mourn what could not be changed.
The smells of Lily’s breakfast wafted his way.
He finagled his morning insulin shot and stood by the bedroom window, buttoning his shirt. Ha! There was Harley getting out of an older-model car with a ski rack.
‘I just saw Harley coming in,’ he told Willie.
‘Been over at Jake’s for a sausage biscuit. With th’ woman he met when he hitched home from th’ tire store.’ Willie set a hatful of eggs on the kitchen counter.
‘He looks mighty jaunty.’
‘They went for a ride last evenin’.’ Willie gave him a look.
As a parson, he was accustomed to knowing what was going on with people. He was completely in the dark about this. ‘How old is this person?’
‘Says she’s th’ same age as him.’
‘Must not be her ski rack, then.’
‘Nossir, she don’t ski, but says a rack makes ’er feel young.’
‘That’s one way,’ he said.
He walked to the barn with Harley, who would be foreman on the removal and replacement of the barn’s rotten floorboards.
‘She wants me to go t’ Las Vegas,’ said Harley. ‘She’ll do th’ drivin’.’
‘Las Vegas, Nevada?’
‘You can see th’ pyramids, she says, I always wanted to see th’ pyramids, an’ you can ride in a boat on a river inside a buildin’.’
‘No way,’ he said.
‘Yessir, she’s been there in person.’
He opened the barn door; Daisy, LuLu, and Pete came running to the cat bowls.
‘When is this to take place?’
‘I ain’t said nothin’ to Dooley yet. Sometime after th’ weddin’, like ever’thing else.’
‘You really want to go to Las Vegas?’
‘Life is short,’ said Harley. ‘God is good. An’ th’ best things in life are free.’
He had never heard talk like this from Harley Welch.
‘Las Vegas is not free. I know that much.’
‘I’ve got a little money saved back. A good bit, t’ tell th’ truth.’
He scooped dry food into the bowls.
‘Does this person know that?’
‘I told her right down to th’ penny, an’ Amber, she says she’s got a good bit saved back her ownself.’
He was no mother hen, but he didn’t like the sound of this.
‘Maybe we should invite her over for . . . I don’t know . . . a glass of tea?’
‘Why?’ said Cynthia.
‘To check her out.’
‘Harley is a grown man.’
‘But Las Vegas? With a woman driving a ski rack?’ Where were his wife’s instincts?
‘I don’t believe Harley would actually stray that far from home. Anyway, I thought he was smitten with Miss Pringle.’
‘Harley was smitten with Miss Pringle when he was with Miss Pringle, and now he’s with this Amber person.’ He remembered the book that came out in the forties, which Tommy Noles found in his mother’s apron drawer. He had been interested in the map of London in the frontispiece until Tommy showed him what was what.
His wife gave him a smile. ‘She has a roofing business.’
‘A what?’
‘A roofing business.’
‘Cynthia. Listen to me. This cannot go on. This ski person is not Harley’s type. A roofing business!’
‘Roofing can be very lucrative.’
Sometimes it was hard being married to an open-minded woman.
He would ask Lily, who catered the Wesley mayor’s annual shindig and knew everybody in these coves and hollers.
‘Amber,’ he said.
&n
bsp; ‘What’s her last name?’
‘I have no idea, I thought the first name would be enough to . . . you don’t know her?’
‘I do not know anybody named Amber in the roofin’ business.’
‘So who do you know in the roofing business?’
‘Tim Bolick. Randy Chase. Billy Upton. Charlie Knight. That’s it.’
‘Can you call around and see if they know anything about this person?’
She gave him a squinty look.
‘Early-model Toyota hatchback,’ he said. ‘White. Ski rack.’
‘I never said she was a roofer, I said she’s a hoofer.’
He was stunned. ‘A hoofer?’
‘A dancer,’ said Harley, grinning.
He wished Harley would put his teeth in, he had gotten used to seeing them. ‘A dancer?’
‘Yessir.’
‘At her age?’
‘She says look at Tina Turner.’
He literally raced to find his wife, who was sitting on the floor in the front hall, painting baseboards.
‘Remember,’ she said, ‘that you swore to never get involved again in somebody’s romance.’
‘Did I say that?’
‘When Shirlene and Omer . . .’
‘But that turned out great. They’re happily married!’
‘Correct. But you said you would completely quit meddling in people’s romances.’
So his wife was confirming that it was a romance. It was official.
‘Harley says she’s not a roofer. She’s a hoofer.’
‘A hoofer?’
‘A dancer.’
‘An exotic dancer?’
‘I have no idea,’ he said.