Epilogue #3
Rhett. You came to my library because I asked you to.
You stayed because I gave you a book. You sat on the floor of my 800s with me when I was crying about a phone call and you did not ask me why.
You walked across the floor when my brother-in-law grabbed my arm and you put yourself between me and him without hurting him.
You sat at a long table with me for four hours on the worst morning of my life and you held my hand under the wood and you did not, one time, all day, clench your fist. You waited five months to ask me because you wanted me to have a winter of my own.
You are the gentlest man I have ever known.
I do not know how a man as gentle as you came to be inside the body of a man as strong as you are, but I have decided that the world is better for it, and that my life is better for it, and that I am going to keep you for as long as you will let me.
I am yours. I will be yours until I am buried in the ground.
The minister says the words.
I put the small braided silver ring of my grandmother's on her hand.
She puts the heavier silver ring she had made for me — by the silversmith in Hot Springs, with a small clean wisteria leaf etched on the inside band that only the two of us will ever see — on my hand.
The minister says I now pronounce.
I kiss her under the wisteria in the late gold June light, slow, careful, the way she taught me, and the garden of Clover Ridge erupts behind us — Hawk lets out the whoop he has been holding in for an hour, Knox actually laughs out loud, Briar is openly crying, Tom from the hardware store has stood up, Sheriff Pell is clapping with his hands above his head — and Nora is laughing against my mouth, and I am laughing against her mouth, and the wisteria is dropping its slow soft petals down onto both of us in a slow constant lavender rain.
We turn together to face the garden.
We walk back down the brick path between the two rows of every person in the town who has ever loved either of us.
Hawk meets us at the back gate with two flutes of champagne.
—
Rhett
Late.
Very late.
It is past midnight and the long tables Knox set up under string lights in the lot behind the clubhouse have started to empty out, and the band Mav hired from over near Asheville is into the slow last hour of the music, and most of the older folks have gone home — Eleanor went home with Mira at ten, hand on Mira's arm, and the library board chair went home at eleven, and Sheriff Pell at eleven thirty — and what is left around the long table is the brothers and their women and the few stragglers from town who never go home from a Clover Ridge wedding because there is no point.
Nora is dancing with Knox.
Knox does not dance.
Knox is dancing with Nora because she asked him to, very small, very level, Knox, would you mind, and Knox put his bourbon down on the long table the way he puts his coffee down on the porch step, and he stood up, and he took her hand, and now he is moving her slow and careful around the lit-up patio with both of his hands on her elbows and his face doing the closest thing to a smile Knox's face does, and Briar across the table from me with her chin in her hand is watching the two of them with her honest brown eyes wet.
I am sitting at the long table with Hawk on one side and Silas across.
Silas lifts his glass.
He says, low, "Brother."
I lift mine.
Hawk lifts his.
Silas says, "Welcome home."
I do not say anything.
I clink my glass against his glass and Hawk's glass.
I drink.
Hawk says, after a long moment, "You know what I'm thinking about."
I say, "What."
He says, "I'm thinking about the kid in the parking lot in Lexington."
I look at him.
He says, "I'm thinking about the kid Knox brought back here in the truck nine years ago.
The one who would not sit on the porch with us for the first month because he didn't trust that we wouldn't put him out at any moment.
The one who slept with one boot on for half a year.
The one I had to teach how to eat at a table with other people because he kept taking his plate back to his room. "
I do not say anything.
Hawk says, "That kid would not believe this."
I say, "No. He would not."
Hawk lifts his glass again, slow.
He says, "To the man he turned into."
Silas says, "To the man he turned into."
I drink with them.
I look across the patio at Nora, dancing slow with Knox under the string lights with her white dress and her ribbon coming a little loose from her hair and the small bouquet of wisteria long since gone but the lavender petals still scattered along the hem of her dress from the garden, and she catches my eye over Knox's shoulder, and she smiles at me the way she did from the gate at the end of the brick path under the falling wisteria, and the inside of my chest does the wing-folding thing it has not stopped doing for fourteen months.
I get up.
I cross the patio.
I say, very gentle, "Knox. May I."
Knox steps back.
He puts her hand in my hand.
He says, "Take care of her, brother."
I say, "I will."
I take my wife — my wife — slow and careful into the slow careful last circle of the dance, and I put my forehead down to her forehead, and the band is playing the soft slow song she put on the list two months ago with a small careful tick mark next to it, and we do not need to talk, and we do not talk.
We just turn slow under the string lights.
The petals from her hem move with us across the patio.
Somewhere down on Linden, a screen door closes.
Somewhere up on the ridge, an owl calls.
Somewhere a year ago, on the roof of this clubhouse at sunrise, a man with a coffee in his hand asked the question one last time, and a woman two blocks away was sleeping in a small house under her grandmother's quilt and had not yet decided to walk up the gravel drive in the morning and ask him to come fix a shelf.
I think about him on the roof.
I think about her in the bed.
I think about the careful slow distance between then and now.
I close my eyes against her hair, and I breathe in the wisteria, and I let myself feel — slow, the way she taught me, all the way down — that I made it.
We made it.
The sun came up.
—
Nora
I wake before he does.
It is the first morning of our marriage, and the light in the small bedroom of his house — our house, the one we bought together in March, the small white clapboard with the wide front porch on the corner of Linden and Pine — is pale and gray through the lace at the window, and he is asleep beside me on his back with one arm flung up over his head and the other one stretched across my pillow with his hand open and palm-up the way he sleeps every night now, and his face in the gray dawn light is so open and so unguarded and so finally at rest that I lie there for a long minute without moving and I let myself look at him.
This is mine.
This man is mine.
I made this happen.
I get up, very careful, the way I do everything, and I pull on his flannel shirt and my pajama bottoms, and I walk on bare feet down the small hall to the kitchen, and I put the kettle on for tea, and I open the back door, and I step out onto the porch in the gray dawn.
The wisteria over the side gate — the new wisteria, the one we planted ourselves in April, the cutting Briar took from the library trellis for us as a wedding gift — has not bloomed yet. It is young. It will bloom next June.
I stand on the porch in the gray dawn with my hand on the porch rail and I look at it.
I look at it and I think about next June, and the June after that, and all the long careful slow run of Junes ahead of us.
I think about the small white house and the small front porch and the man asleep in the bed in the back room.
I think about my library two blocks down on Main.
I think about the cedar bench in the garden under the trellis where it all started.
I think about my mother on the phone on Sunday afternoons.
I think about Briar across the long table at the clubhouse last night with her chin in her hand and her eyes wet.
I think about the woman I was the morning I walked up the gravel drive.
She did not know.
She walked up the drive to ask a man to fix a shelf, and she did not know.
The kettle starts to whistle inside the kitchen.
I turn to go in.
The back door opens before I get to it.
He is there, in his jeans and no shirt, with his hair sleep-mussed and his eyes still soft and half-asleep, and he holds the door open with one hand, and he holds his other hand out to me on the porch.
He says, "Come back to bed."
I take his hand.
I go back to bed with him.
Out on the porch, the kettle whistles itself quiet again.
Out in the side yard, the small young wisteria over the gate holds the slow careful promise of next June in the tight green buds at the end of every vine.
The sun comes up over Clover Ridge.
The day begins.
We will be here for all of it.