Chapter 15
The morning after the storm, Errol drove out to Pinewood Hollow in his old Ford truck with two bottles of water and a thermos of coffee for his son-in-law.
He carried Imari out of the small pediatric ward of the Medical Center while his daughter was still asleep on her husband's shoulder.
He settled Imari in the back seat of his truck with her new asthma inhaler and a peach scone he had bought her at a Houston bakery at five in the morning, because he had known on the drive out that she was going to be hungry.
He carried her without waking her. He did this for Aurora. He had not, in any of his sixty-two years, been a man who said get some sleep and not meant it.
Halston drove Aurora back to the estate four hours later, after she had finally been allowed to wake up on her own.
*****
Six weeks went by.
Imari's asthma got brought under control.
She was on a daily controller and a rescue inhaler.
The pediatric pulmonologist in Houston, a woman named Dr. Pellegrini, told them she had probably had mild symptoms for at least a year and that nobody could have known for certain until something triggered it.
Halston, who had sat in the consult with both hands flat on the desk for the entire appointment, asked the doctor to repeat that line three times.
Aurora began to show in earnest.
The small swell at her stomach the morning she had told Halston had become, by the end of October, a real curve under her linen dresses and a quiet rounded weight in her low back. The morning sickness had gone. The bone-deep tiredness had gone. The strange new appetite for very cold mango had not.
Yvette had a bowl of it on the breakfast table every morning for her.
The whole estate seemed, somehow, to soften.
Halston came home for dinner every evening that he was not on a plane, and he was on a plane less and less. He had begun, quietly and without telling anyone, to delegate.
Rhett had been seen at the Pinewood Hollow office four mornings out of five for a stretch of three weeks running, and the executives at Iverson Aerospace and Defense who had spent five years being terrified of Halston Iverson found themselves, slowly, being managed instead by a Black man in his mid-thirties in a perfectly cut gray suit who knew everyone's first names and laughed easily.
*****
It was on a rainy Tuesday morning in the second week of November that Halston walked into Aurora's sunroom unannounced.
He had been in Houston that morning as he had a meeting at one. He should have been there.
Aurora looked up from the worktable, brush in hand, when she heard the door slide. He was in his navy suit with no tie, his hair damp, his coat folded over his arm.
“Halston.”
“Aurora. Put the brush down.”
“What is wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong. Put the brush down. I need to look at you.”
She set the brush in the small glass of water beside her elbow and stood up, slowly, with one hand on her lower back. She came around the worktable.
Halston dropped his coat on the slipper chair. He took both of her hands.
“I want to do it again,” he said.
“Do what again?”
“Marry you.”
“Halston...”
“Properly this time. Aurora. Our wedding. The one we were supposed to have. On the front lawn. With the people we love. I want to write our own vows. I want your father to walk you down the aisle. I want Imari to scatter the flowers. I want you in a dress you choose. I want it to be ours. Aurora. Will you do it. Will you marry me again.”
Aurora cried and laughed all at the same time.
She did not have any other words. Halston pulled his pregnant wife into his arms and kissed her in the middle of the watercolor light.
Aurora said yes, over and over again, into his mouth, before he had even finished the question.
“Yes, baby. Yes. Yes.”
“Aurora.”
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, Halston.”
*****
The wedding was set on the lawn of the Pinewood Hollow estate..
Ayanna handled the food, with Yvette as her commanding officer. Folake, who had quietly relocated to Houston for an indefinite period, handled the flowers and ran every design call from a borrowed desk in Aurora's studio.
The two women bickered, gently and affectionately, about white roses versus white camellias for the altar arrangement, and Yvette finally settled it by saying, Ladies.
Both. The camellias smell like the south yard.
The roses are for the photographs. Both.
They bickered next about whether the rehearsal dinner cocktail should be a French 75 or a julep. They settled on both of those too.
Folake flew in from Houston on the second weekend in November and took Aurora dress shopping with Yvette and Ayanna.
They drove into Houston in Halston's black SUV, the four of them, and they went to a bridal salon in River Oaks that Folake had quietly arranged to be closed to other clients for two hours.
Aurora tried on six dresses.
She knew the dress when Yvette pulled it out.
It was ivory silk crepe, long, with a soft draped cowl neckline and a small empire waist that fell loosely over her growing stomach without trying to hide it. The skirt was cut so it would move in a slow breeze. The back was open. There was no train, no lace and no veil.
It was the dress, Aurora thought when she stepped out of the dressing room in it and turned slowly in front of the three women on the slipper bench.
Folake, on the bench, set down her champagne flute.
“Mama.”
“Don't.”
“Mama. You look amazing, Maeve would be losing her mind.”
Aurora laughed through her tears.
Ayanna stood up, crossed to Aurora and fixed one curl at Aurora's temple that had drifted in the dressing room.
“That's the one, baby,” she said softly.
Yvette nodded. “That is the one, chère.”
*****
The morning of the wedding came up clear.
Pinewood Hollow had given them, for one day in January, a cool dry blue that was not Texan weather.
The wind off the bay was very light. The Spanish moss in the live oaks did not move.
The white wooden chairs that had been set up across the front lawn between the trees did not need to be weighted down. The single aisle runner was untouched.
Aurora got dressed in her old bedroom at the Iverson estate, the master suite she had moved into three months ago.
Yvette pinned her hair. Ayanna pinned the small white camellia behind her left ear.
Folake came in with Aurora's small bouquet — white camellias and a single trailing length of cream silk ribbon. She set it on the dresser and looked at Aurora in the mirror for a long moment. Then she said, quietly, “Aurora, you look beautiful, your day is finally here and I couldn’t be happier for you. I know Maeve is looking down on you. She sees you and she is smiling back at you”.
Tears pricked at Aurora’s eyes; she tilted her head back to avoid them falling.
“Now let’s go get you married!”
*****
Halston was already on the front lawn when Aurora came down the marble staircase on her father's arm.
He was at the small white wooden altar Errol had been building since they decided to get married all over again.
Errol was in a black suit and a white shirt, no tie, his hands at his sides. His hair, which had begun in the last two months to take on a faint dusting of silver at the temples, was neatly cut. He held out his arm.
“You look beautiful baby, he is the luckiest man in the world.”
“I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you, baby. Let's go.”
Imari, now, taller, in a blue dress, was given a nod by Errol and she began to walk down the aisle scattering petals down the runner from a small white basket.
They walked the long front gallery together. They came out the bronze doors and down the limestone steps. The string quartet on the lawn started to play.
It was a piece Halston had quietly chosen. It was the piece they had danced to at the Wortham Symphony benefit four months earlier.
Aurora heard the first three bars and laughed out loud once before she could stop it.
Halston, at the altar, watched her come down the aisle on her father's arm and lost the careful composure he had been maintaining for ninety days.
His eyes filled.
He did not blink them clear.
He let them fill.
Aurora saw it.
Errol reached Halston at the altar and stopped.
He took Aurora's hand off his arm and placed it, deliberately, into Halston's hand. He held both of their hands together for a half second longer than the gesture required.
Then he said, quietly, only for them, “You take care of her. You take care of all of them.”
Halston, in his black suit, with his bride's hand in his own and his stepfather-in-law's eyes on him, said, just as quietly, “Yes, sir. Every day of my life.”
Errol kissed his daughter on the forehead.
He stepped back and took his seat in the front row beside Ayanna.
Rhett stood up on the groom's side as best man.
Folake stood up on the bride's side as maid of honor.
The officiant started the ceremony. She read the civil words then nodded to Halston.
He had folded his vows on a small cream square of cardstock. He opened the card and held it in his left hand. He held Aurora's right hand in his other.
“Aurora,” he said.
The whole lawn went still.