Chapter 21
The magazine people arrived at seven in the morning on the second Saturday in July, and by eight Hank’s house was full of ladders, cameras, lights, and cables, which was everything he’d been promised back in May and had dreaded like a root canal ever since.
He stood in the doorway of his own front parlor with a cup of coffee and discovered he didn’t mind it at all.
The photographer, a brisk woman from New York named Dani, had walked into the foyer, stopped dead under the fourteen-foot ceiling, looked up the curve of the restored staircase with its hundred and ten years of hands worn into the banister, and breathed one word, reverently. “Patina.”
Tessa, standing behind her, had caught Sunny’s eye across the hall and mouthed, Told you, and Sunny had laughed her whole laugh, the unguarded one she laughed a lot these day. The photo shoot had proceeded from there in the best possible way.
They shot the composite gown made of all the WoWS wedding dresses on Jenna at the foot of the staircase, with the morning light streaming in through the tall windows in long honeyed columns.
Charlotte hovered with pins in her mouth, adjusting folds of fabric a quarter inch at a time. Hank, who knew nothing about gowns and intended to keep it that way, knew enough to understand what he was looking at, though.
Eight widows’ dresses, the ones they’d each been married in, had been carefully taken apart and rebuilt into one dress for the first of them to marry again. The dress was eight stories in one. The magazine could have its glossy pages. This dress and its story belonged to this town and always would.
“The dish rail,” Dani said at one point, aiming her chin at the dining room, where Presley’s framed drawing of a pair of hands playing a guitar stood propped among the gleam of the picture lights. “Whose work is that? I want it in the establishing shots.”
“Local artist,” Hank said gravely. “She’s ten. Her gallery rate is going up as we speak.”
Madison, on quality control as always, charged the magazine five dollars on Presley’s behalf for the rights. Dani paid it in cash, laughing, and called it the best contract negotiation she’d survived all year.
By eleven the crew had what it needed. The eight bridesmaids—Sunny had argued against being included in the wedding party since she was a newcomer to town and been unanimously overruled—were photographed in a pastel row on the front porch, eight gowns designed to fit each of them just right, none of them alive.
They were made in eight shades Charlotte had matched to each of them.
Molly wore green as befit an herb farmer.
Rose wore mauve because it was her favorite and also her best color.
Bonnie wore robin’s-egg blue to match her eyes.
Natalie was dressed in yellow to match her personality, and Tessa in pale ice blue to match hers.
Grace wore pastel pink as delicate as her coloring, and Charlotte had made a lavender gown for herself .
Sunny’s gown was a warm peach color that made her auburn hair glow like a fiery sunset.
Hank looked at her exactly as long as a man could look without becoming the latest gossip, which in Cobbler Cove was not long, and went upstairs to hide until the commotion wound down.
Cobbler Cove Church had been built in 1911 out of the valley’s native stone, blue and gray and white under a white steeple.
Inside it was light and bright with tall windows pouring early afternoon sun across dark-wood pews and a floor of the same stone as the walls.
By one o’clock it held every soul in Cobbler Cove who could walk, ride, or be carried there.
The seven Shoemacher children had been delighted to be included in this momentous event and all of them had taken time off jobs and out of their lives to come back for it.
They sat together in a pew halfway back, present, invited, and looking only a little like people braced for bad weather, which by Hank’s measure said they were healing at a gallop.
The grooms’ side of the altar was crowded.
Sully Crawford stood at the head of it with his jaw set like a man about to ride the eight most important seconds of his life.
Strung out behind him were all the cowboys he’d dragged to the Foster Ranch last fall.
His brothers, Cash and Boone. Cooper, Tucker, and Gray Lawson.
And last but not least, the three Steele brothers.
Nine men who’d come to this town and had their lives taken apart and completely rebuilt by this place, newer, stronger, and better, same as Jenna’s gown.
“You called dibs,” Reno murmured out the side of his mouth as the organist took her place behind the altar and the church began to go quiet. “Back in May. There were only seven bridesmaids back then and eight of us cowboys, and you called dibs on being the man who got to sit out.”
“I remember.”
“And then the WoWS went and found themselves a ninth member.” Reno’s gaze slid down the aisle to where the bridesmaids were assembling at the back of the church. “Funny how that math worked out.”
“Quit talking in church,” Hank muttered back. “Didn’t your mama teach you any manners?”
His brother grinned like a rodeo clown who’d just heard the chute open on a big, rank bull.
The processional was a parade of everything the town had been through and come out the other side of.
Lily scattered white rose petals with the focus of a surgeon. Bobby Foster, six years old and solemn as a deacon in his small boots, walked his mother down the aisle, and gave her away at the altar in a clear voice that took the entire church’s heart clean out of its chest.
Chloe escaped the Carter pew at a crucial moment, but was intercepted by Madison before she reached the open space in front of the pews.
The toddler spent the remainder of the ceremony on Madison’s lap, narrating in a whisper that everyone in the church could hear between the proceedings up front , that all present were now horses.
The groomsmen joined the bridesmaids in the back and each of the widows came down the aisle on the arm of the cowboy she’d agreed to marry, one healed story at a time.
The last pair, Hank with Sunny’s hand resting warm in the crook of his elbow, walked past every person in town, none of whom were even pretending not to grin knowingly at the two of them.
The vows were the traditional ones with old-fashioned I do’s, which was how folks around here liked them.
Sully’s voice cracked on in sickness and in health and steadied on as long as we both shall live.
Jenna, looking radiant in a gown made of eight marriages, said her part looking back and forth between her son in the front pew and the man in front of her, and not one person in that church found anything wrong with that.
Hank stood at the anchor end of the line and watched Sunny across the church, and the thing he’d carried up the church steps in his breast pocket sat against his heart, patient and waiting for the right moment, the way all the best things in life are worth waiting for.
The reception filled Hank’s house to its hundred-and-ten-year-old rafters, which was, Hank understood at long last, the entire point of the house.
Grace’s magnificent cake stood five tiers tall in the dining room, and her flowers ran down the center of every table, whites and creams and blushes spilling out of mason jars that were both elegant and country casual, entirely fitting for this wedding and this town.
The twins conducted tours of the laundry chute for a nickel a head until Sunny shut the enterprise down on safety grounds and Madison, as standing counsel, oversaw the twins’ reluctant refunds.
Ruth Sanger held court in the front parlor in her good pearls, and the Shoemacher children stood in the kitchen being fed by Rose, which in this town was citizenship, notarized.
The toasts began at sunset.
Cooper toasted the bride. Cash toasted the groom. Boone toasted the casserole brigade of Cobbler Cove, without whom, he noted, not one man on the premises would have survived to his own wedding.
And then Reno stood up on a chair with a glass in his hand and the look of a lawyer approaching his closing argument, and Hank felt the whole evening turn and point itself at him like a compass needle finding north.
“Nine months ago,” Reno said, “Sully Crawford was just passing through this town on his way to another rodeo. Look at him now. And look at the rest of us. Every man standing up at that altar today followed him to this town one way or another. Which is to say, it’s all your fault we’re here, Sully.”
That got a round of laughter, and the other cowboys razzed Sully for a few moments before Reno continued.
“This town took each of us guys apart like old busted-up cars and rebuilt every last one of us. As if that wasn’t enough, this town handed every last one of us a woman way, way too good for him.”
He waited out the laughter.
“Every one of us found a home in Cobbler Cove. We found love, and we found the families we’d been missing out on.
Every single one of us.” His gaze drifted, slow and deliberate as a search light, until it stopped on his oldest brother.
“Except, of course, for the man whose house we’re all standing in. ”
The room’s laughter rolled toward Hank, warm and fond and merciless, three hundred faces turning his way. He saw Madison’s among them, and Sunny’s blushing brightly by the dining room door with Chloe asleep on her shoulder.
Hank set down his glass and stood up.