Chapter 25
Easton
The morning of the wedding, I was at the kitchen sink in my grandmother's house, looking out the back window at the chairs in the grass.
I'd been up since five.
The chairs were the folding kind the firehouse used for the annual pancake breakfast on Main, and Mendoza had hauled them over in the bay truck at six.
He'd set them up in rows, eight across, twelve deep, with an aisle of grass down the middle that ran from the back porch to the rose bed at the fence.
The roses were pink this year. I hadn't fed the soil. I'd let her have her say.
Penny was under the biggest one.
I'd stood at the back window most mornings since the snow came off the ground in March, looked at the rose, and let myself feel what I felt about her being there.
The feeling had a shape now, the same shape it had been for my grandmother, which was that the missing didn't stop being missing, and the rest of me was allowed to keep going.
It had been five months since I'd driven a truck back from Queens with one box unpacked and a slot I didn't want.
We'd driven down to Queens the week after I'd come home.
Astrid rode shotgun in the truck with Moose in the back seat and her hand on my thigh through the part of Route 23 that ran along the river.
She'd never seen Queens. She'd told me at the kitchen counter the night before, chin on the back of her hand, that she'd been to New York maybe four times in her whole life and never gotten further than the island.
We did the apartment in a weekend.
The boxes that took me eighteen months to pack the first time, and a single morning to pack the second time, came back to Hartsdale in the back of the truck in one trip.
Astrid labeled them with the Sharpie she'd brought from her kitchen.
She wrapped my grandmother's brass lamp in a sweatshirt of mine because the bubble wrap was cheap.
She made me sit on the floor of the kitchen with her on the Saturday night, eating Thai food from the place on the corner, and she watched me look around the apartment one last time. She didn't ask me if I was alright.
She'd known.
I took her to 295 on the Sunday afternoon.
Shane hugged her at the bay door. Maya, Sloane, and Ava pulled her in at dinner that night like they'd been waiting on her since September.
Brian's new baby slept on Astrid's chest through the whole meal, and she looked like a woman who had been at a thing like this her whole life.
We moved into the bungalow the second week in February.
Astrid moved across Maple in pieces.
Her mother's coffee maker came to the counter in the bungalow's kitchen, next to the one that had been my grandmother's, and Astrid picked her mother's because her mother's had a timer.
Her herbs came to the windowsill above the sink, the rosemary, thyme, and sage in the small terra-cotta pots she'd carried up from Boston in September.
Her veterinary journals came to the table in the hall by the leather chair.
The Diane Ackerman went on the second shelf of the bookcase under the window, between my grandmother's hardcover Tasha Tudor and a paperback of mine that had been on the shelf since I was nineteen.
Moose's bed went by the back door where Penny's had been.
I put it there on a Sunday afternoon in February.
Astrid came into the kitchen behind me with a box in her arms and stopped at the threshold and watched me set it down.
She didn't say anything. She came over and put her hand on my shoulder, left it there a beat, then carried the box down the hall to the bedroom that had become ours.
My grandmother's recipe cards stayed in the top drawer of the kitchen, where they'd lived for forty years.
The brass lamp went back to the side table next to the leather chair.
The cast iron went on the stove, where I'd taken it down to make pot roast on a Saturday in November, and where I'd been taking it down on Saturdays since.
Steve moved in at his discretion.
He showed up the third week, walked the perimeter of the kitchen, jumped onto the top of the refrigerator, and lay down.
He stayed three days. He went back to the clinic.
He came back the following Tuesday. Astrid told me, after the third trip, that this was the arrangement and that I was not going to be consulted on it. I told her I'd accepted my role.
Caldwell called every client he'd had for thirty years and told them the practice on Elm was closing, that he was retiring, and that he wanted them to bring their charts across town. The charts came. The waiting room filled. Astrid hired a second tech in March.
I went back to Hartsdale Fire the week after I'd come home.
Lou met me in the bay on the morning of my first shift back. He didn't say anything about Queens. He handed me my gear out of the locker and told me Halsey had eggs on.
The breath in my chest had stayed down.
It stayed down through the winter, through Astrid moving in, through Steve on the refrigerator, the recipe cards in the drawer, and the brass lamp coming back to the side table.
The breath had a place now. The place was the kitchen, the backyard, the rose at the fence, and the woman who slept beside me on the side toward the door, because she'd taken it the first week and hadn't given it back.
The wedding planning took three months, most of which was the war between Audrey and Duke.
Whether the cake was going to have buttercream or fondant—
"Buttercream," said Audrey.
"Fondant," said Duke.
"Buttercream," said Astrid.
"The answer is buttercream," said Easton. "Duke, stop."
Whether Audrey's dress was going to be in the sage or the dusty rose—
"Sage," said Audrey.
"I have an opinion," said Duke.
"Nobody asked you."
Whether Duke's mother's spaniel was going to be in the wedding—
"Moose is doing the rings," Astrid said. "The spaniel cannot be trusted. The answer is no."
They'd been in my kitchen for three months, pretending to hate each other.
I watched Duke pull a chair out for her at the table the second week of February and pretend he'd been pulling it out for himself.
I watched Audrey hand him the wine bottle in March without looking up.
I watched her steal a fry off his plate at the diner the week before the wedding, and he didn't say anything about it, which meant he'd been letting her steal fries for some time.
Astrid clocked all of it.
She didn't say anything either.
Astrid's parents flew up the day before the wedding.
Her father cried on the phone the night before that. Astrid held the phone six inches from her ear and looked at me across the kitchen. She let him cry, and her mother took the phone at some point and told him in a brisk voice to pull himself together because he was going to scare the dog.
We didn't get any sleep.
I lay awake beside her on the side toward the door, and she lay awake beside me with her hand on my chest, and at four in the morning, she said, into the dark, "Are you nervous?"
"I'm not nervous."
"Liar."
"I'm a little nervous."
"About what?"
"My vows."
"Easton."
"Yeah."
"You wrote them three weeks ago. You've read them to me four times."
"I know."
"They're good."
"I know."
"What is it?"
"I don't know if I can get it out without losing it."
She was quiet for a beat. Then she turned her face against my shoulder and let her breath out. "Then lose it. I'll be right there."
I kissed the top of her head.
I didn't sleep after.
The morning came in cool, with the air still holding the river and the sun working at it from the east. By eight, the chairs were in the grass.
By nine, the crew had the arch up at the rose end of the aisle, two posts and a crossbar Mendoza had built in the shop over the winter, with climbing roses Audrey had cut from Mrs. Halloran's back fence twined through the lattice.
By ten, the band was set up on the back porch.
By eleven, the caterer was in the kitchen, the bartender was at the side gate, and Duke was in the spare bedroom, swearing at his own tie.
I went in there at eleven-fifteen.
He was at the dresser mirror with the tie undone around his neck.
"Rhodes."
"Ford."
"You can't tie a tie."
"I can tie a tie. This tie is the wrong tie."
"That's the tie Audrey picked."
"I'm aware."
I came over and took the two ends. He let me. I did the four-in-hand because that was the one I'd learned at fifteen for my other grandmother's funeral and done on Sunday mornings since. I tightened it at the throat. I straightened it under his collar.
He looked at himself in the mirror.
"Are you good?"
"Yeah."
"Are you sure?"
"Ford."
"Yeah."
"Don't."
I didn't.
I clapped him on the shoulder on my way out.
I was at the back window of the kitchen at eleven-thirty, with my own jacket over the chair and the cuffs of my shirt still unbuttoned, looking out at the chairs in the grass with my coffee in one hand.
The chairs were full.
The Bishops were in the third row with Cooper between them, and Cooper had on a navy bowtie that the Bishop boy had picked out himself.
Mrs. Halloran was in the fifth row in a hat the size of a hubcap.
Halsey was in the back with his wife and his cat, who was on a leash and was not having any of it.
Mendoza was in the back too, with his terrier in his lap.
Caldwell was in the last row, on the aisle, in the suit he'd gotten married in in 1981.
My mother sent a card. I read it at the kitchen counter that morning and set it down and went back to the coffee. The yard was full. That was the whole thing.
Shane and Maya were in the row in front of him. Brian and Ava beside them with the baby asleep on Brian's chest. Garrett and Sloane on Maya's other side. Theo between them, in a clip-on tie with a paperback open on his knee.