Fifty-Two
Bridie had refused to look at the weather report all week.
Not that it mattered whether the day was sunny or cloudy, whether it rained or snowed, which wasn’t likely in early November but certainly possible.
But when she woke that morning, the sun was brightening a cloudless sky.
A perfect day for a wedding. Her previous wedding dress was still on a padded hanger in a voluminous white garment bag at the back of her closet, but she wasn’t going to wear it.
She’d thought about it for weeks. It wasn’t the dress she wanted.
That dress was for a different wedding and a different girl.
Someone less sure of herself, afraid of her own shadow.
Someone who had let herself be talked into an ivory gown with puffed sleeves and a too-long veil, a vestige of that obnoxious board game.
One afternoon, she’d found a vintage suit at a secondhand store downtown that fit her like a dream.
The material was a soft wool flannel in a deep forest green.
The peplumed jacket had tiny gold-rimmed pearl buttons running up to the rounded collar.
The skirt fell to her midcalf. She bought a pair of Mary Jane pumps with a block heel and a silver strap across the top of the foot.
Nina had given her a seeded-pearl brooch that looked like a spray of flowers to wear on the jacket collar and because it was November, she was going to carry a nosegay of orange and yellow tea roses.
She played with her hair, tried to pull it back into a chignon but couldn’t figure out how to get it to stay in place, so she finally brushed it smooth and let it lie around her face and shoulders.
She was late, so she ran up the steps to the courthouse and when she entered the waiting room, she saw Dune before he saw her.
She watched him fiddle with his shirt cuffs, brush something off his pants, run a hand over his clean-shaven face.
When he turned and saw her, she felt the weight, the comfort, of all the Bridies and all the Dunes.
Dune on a bicycle weaving erratically down the street after taking off his training wheels and then slamming into a tree when he forgot to brake.
He still had a thin white scar on his chin from that day, shiny and whisker-free.
She saw him throwing a football in the street and delivering papers before the sun was up and waving to her from their respective bathroom windows and then the emptiness of the always-curtained window after their parents married.
She saw him take the chair next to her that night at the fundraiser and the surprise on his face when he realized who she was.
She saw him at her front door one Sunday morning weeks ago, looking gaunt and sad and carrying the little painting from the auction that he’d tracked down for her: After Monet’s Sun through Fog.
“I can’t accept this,” she’d said. “Please, Bridie,” Dune said, referring, she knew, not to the painting but to all of it.
To them. “Please,” he said again, and handed her something else: his ninety-day chip from AA, and she felt the first glimmer of hope she’d had in months.
Dune took a step toward the door and saw a flash of nine-year-old Bridie with denim shorts and skinned knees and torn sneakers, begging to play with her sister.
He saw her walking to school in her too-short navy school uniform and coming out of the house one spring evening in a light pink prom dress, on the arm of someone who didn’t appreciate her.
He thought about a moment so many years ago—was he fourteen?
Fifteen?—when they’d agreed to play hide-and-seek with the younger kids on the block.
She went to her favorite hiding place, under the arbor in the Tannenbaums’ backyard, the one the girls called the wedding bush because when it was in full bloom, they could shake the branches, and tiny white petals would fall all over their hair and shoulders like a veil.
When she swept away the blossoming branches one day, Dune was already sitting there hiding.
“Shh,” he whispered and motioned for her to sit next to him.
They sat quietly and tried not to laugh and as the minutes went by and their breath started to synchronize, they could smell each other.
Bridie smelled like the cedar chest where her sweater usually lived and strawberry shampoo.
Dune smelled like Irish Spring and grass and the chocolate bar he’d just eaten.
They both realized their legs were touching, and when Dune looked at Bridie and she didn’t make a move to inch away he clocked the nakedness of her expression, how her guileless smile opened her face like a flower turning to the sun.
He felt his heart start to pound. “Are you okay?” she whispered, and he wanted to ask her a question, any question, but at that exact moment someone yelled, “Olly olly oxen free!” and she jumped up and said, “We won!” They both thought about the night they first kissed.
How easy it was. How terrifying and true.
She moved across the threshold of the door toward him and all their parents sitting in a row, chatting and smiling.
Finn with his arm around Nina. Honey holding Hank’s hand.
Her dad, fiddling with his watch, slightly apart from the others.
Bridie felt a twinge of regret that Clara had honored Bridie’s request to stay away, just for this one day, because Clara could have been a companion for Sam; he wouldn’t have had to sit alone.
But then Sam leaned over and whispered something to Nina and Finn and they all laughed quietly.
Why had she thought it would be so hard to have her parents here?
It was good. It was lovely. Dune put out a hand.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “I hope you weren’t worried.”
“Never,” he said. “Never worried. Always grateful.”
And she stepped into his arms and felt peace. He kissed the top of her head.
“Next!” the county clerk yelled to a room that only contained their party. Ten minutes later the judge was saying to the beaming couple, “I now pronounce you.” I pronounce you. They were pronounced.