Epilogue #2
My mother started calling me, slow, careful, in March.
She started after Pauline lost the case and Pauline stopped speaking to her for two months and my mother — for the first time in seventy years — had a quiet house and no one in it telling her what her youngest daughter was.
She called me. She asked me how I was. She did not call me Eleanor the way she has my whole life, the formal middle name that was her own mother's name.
She called me Nora. She had never called me Nora in my life before.
We talk on Sunday afternoons.
Not for long. Twenty minutes. Sometimes thirty.
She asks about the library. She asks about the garden.
She has, twice, asked about Rhett — carefully, the way you ask about weather in a country you have never visited — and I have told her, carefully, the truth.
He is gentle. He is patient. He sits on the floor of my kitchen and reads books I give him.
He has built me a bench and a trellis and a cedar arch and a small new bookshelf for the back room of the library.
He has never raised his voice in my house.
He has never broken a thing in my house.
He looks at me, my mother, like I am the only book he wants to read.
The first time I said that to her, she was quiet for a long moment.
Then she said, Oh. Eleanor. Oh, Nora. That is — that is good.
She is coming today.
She is coming alone. Pauline is not. Pauline is in Richmond with Graham and with whatever silence she has built around herself there, and I have made my peace with that, slow, careful, over the winter.
She did not write back to my Christmas card.
She did not call. She is not here. She may never be here.
I have stopped waiting for her to be here.
I have a town that is here. I have a man who is here.
I have a mother — improbably, in the late slow turn of her own life — who is here.
That is enough.
That is more than I once thought I would have.
Briar comes around the corner of the library with her arms full of white peonies and the last of the lilac.
She stops when she sees me.
She says, "Sweetheart, you're early."
I say, "I wanted to see it."
She comes over. She puts the peonies down on the cedar bench.
She wipes her hands on her apron — she is in the gardening apron over the dress she is going to wear, and her hair is up in the careful way Wren does it — and she takes both my hands and she looks at me with her honest brown eyes the way she has looked at me since the morning she sent me up the gravel drive to the clubhouse a year ago.
She says, "Are you all right."
I say, "Yes."
She says, "Truly."
I say, "Truly."
She says, "Then I am going to put these peonies on the cedar arch and I am going to go find Wren, who has gone twice now to look for the ribbon for your hair, and I am going to send Elara out here to do your hair on the bench in the sun while the light is still good. Do not move."
I say, "I will not move."
She kisses my cheek.
She goes.
I sit on the cedar bench in my white dress — the dress I bought in Asheville in April, simple, soft, with small embroidered honeybees along the hem because Elara teased that the garden was already enough decoration and that the dress should not try to compete — and I look at the garden, and I breathe slow, and I count my breaths, and I think about the careful slow turn the last year of my life has taken.
Elara comes around the corner with the ribbon.
She does my hair on the cedar bench in the late afternoon sun, careful, slow, twisting it up off my neck and pinning it the way she pins her own when she is throwing pots, and she does not say anything for a long time, only hums something low and warm under her breath, and then she says, quiet, "He waited five months to ask you, you know. "
I say, "I know."
She says, "He told Axel he was waiting because he wanted you to have a winter of your own first. A winter where no one was taking anything from you."
I do not say anything.
I close my eyes against the sun.
I think: yes. That is exactly what he did. He gave me a winter.
Elara finishes the ribbon. She tucks the last strand. She steps back. She looks at me with her tilted careful potter's eye, and she nods, once, satisfied.
She says, "He is going to cry when he sees you."
I say, "He does not cry."
She says, "He is going to cry."
—
Rhett
I am at the cedar arch at ten minutes to six.
Hawk is beside me as my best man, in a dark suit he had to be marched into the tailor's in Asheville to buy and which fits him very well, and Knox is beside Hawk in his sheriff's-honor-guard posture which Knox cannot turn off in any context, and Silas and Mav and Diesel and Razor are in the front row of the garden in their suits with Briar and Wren and Nadia in their dresses beside them, and Elara is by the arch holding the small bouquet she made Nora out of wisteria and white peony and a single sprig of rosemary from her own back step, and Mira Quintrell of Asheville is in the second row in her cream linen with her hand on my mother-in-law-in-eleven-minutes Eleanor Lyttleton-Ashby's hand, because the two of them have become unlikely friends over the spring, and Tom from the hardware store is in the third row with his sister, and Sheriff Pell is in the back, and the library board chair is in the fourth row with her sensible cardigan over her shoulders against the small evening cool, and the rest of the garden is the town of Clover Ridge in folding chairs and standing along the back wall and pressed up against the gate, and the wisteria is dropping its slow soft petals into the brick aisle, and the late June sun is going long and gold across all of it.
I am not nervous.
I have not been nervous all day.
I told her I would not be and I am not.
The string player at the back of the garden — a young woman from the Asheville symphony who plays the small public concerts Wren's friend organizes at the bandshell on Saturday afternoons — lifts her bow.
The first slow careful notes of the piece Nora chose come into the garden.
The gate at the end of the brick path opens.
She walks through.
She walks through with her hand on her mother's arm, slow, careful, the way she walks everywhere, in the white dress with the small embroidered honeybees, with the ribbon Elara braided through her hair, with the small bouquet of wisteria and peony and rosemary held in her other hand, and her face when she sees me at the end of the path under the arch is the face she had the morning a year ago in my bed when she said I love you without the stutter.
Elara is right.
I do cry.
I do not move when I cry. I do not put my hand to my face.
I stand at the cedar arch in my suit with my hands clasped in front of me, the way Knox stands, the way my grandfather is in the one photograph I have of him, and I let the two slow careful tears go down the sides of my face and I do not wipe them, and Hawk beside me does not say anything, and Knox beside Hawk does not say anything, and the garden does not say anything, and Nora at the other end of the brick path under the falling wisteria petals looks at me across all of it, and she smiles, and she does not stop walking.
She comes up the path to the arch.
She stops in front of me.
Her mother kisses her cheek and goes to sit down beside Mira Quintrell in the second row.
She looks up at me.
She says, very small, very level, "Hi."
I say, "Hi."
I take her hands.
The minister begins.
I do not remember most of what he says. I remember her face.
I remember the soft fall of wisteria petals coming down onto her hair and the shoulder of her white dress.
I remember her small steady hand in my hand.
I remember the moment he says do you take this man and she says I do without the stutter, and the moment he says do you take this woman and I say I do and my voice is steady, and the moment we say the vows we have written together on the kitchen table on a Tuesday in May with two mugs of tea between us — vows we wrote slow, careful, line by line, the way she taught me to do everything, the way she has taught me to live.
I say to her, in front of the cedar arch and the garden and the town:
Nora. I came to your door a year ago because you asked me to fix a shelf.
I came back the next day because you gave me a book.
I came back every day after because you looked at me like I was a man, not a weapon, and you kept looking at me that way until I started to believe you.
I do not know what I did to deserve being looked at by you.
I will spend the rest of my life trying to find out.
I will keep your shelves anchored. I will keep your garden watered.
I will keep your hand in mine through every long table and every hard phone call and every quiet morning for as long as you want me to keep it there.
I am yours. I have been yours since the morning you walked up the gravel drive.
I am going to be yours until I am buried in the ground.
She is crying.
She does not stop me.
She says, when it is her turn, level, the small clear careful voice she has built for herself over the last year: