28. Geo
— ? —
Geo
We marry each other again on a Tuesday.
Nobody ever took the first set of vows away from us.
There was no courtroom and no paperwork and no day we stopped being married on paper.
What there was, for a year, was a marriage nobody was standing inside.
So we’re doing it over, on a Tuesday, because Tuesdays aren’t special.
Because we wanted a day that was just ours, unmarked by significance or anniversary or the weight of what the date used to mean.
I get ready in the bedroom that used to be only mine and is ours again now, Mom doing up the long row of buttons at my back with hands that keep going still every time she has to stop and press a tissue to her eyes. She claims it’s her allergies. There isn’t a flower in the room.
Two cards sit propped on the dresser where I can see them in the mirror.
The first came with a gift that arrived yesterday, a crystal vase so expensive I was afraid to touch it, wrapped in paper that probably cost more than my dress.
The card said only four words, Wishing you both happiness, and beneath them a single formal initial: R.
I read them a dozen times this morning, trying to find my father underneath the formality, and I couldn’t, and I set the card down and finished my coffee anyway.
He isn’t coming. The absence sits at the edge of the day like weather, a cold front hovering just past the property line.
I’m learning to hold it and get dressed at the same time.
The second came from Arizona three days ago, Vivian’s looping handwriting still the same as it was on the birthday cards she sent me when we were kids.
I’m working on ready, she wrote. I’m proud of you both.
I’m not ready either, and I’m not sure I ever will be all the way.
But I tucked her card into my jewelry box with the other things that matter too much to throw away, and this morning I propped it where I’d see it.
The door that slammed has a crack of light under it now. That will have to be enough for today.
Mom fastens the last button and turns me by the shoulders to face the mirror. “There,” she says, thick. “Okay. Go.”
The garden behind the house is small and perfect, white chairs in two short rows, an arch wrapped in greenery that Mom spent three hours perfecting this morning while Harrison and I pretended not to be nervous.
A small circle of people who matter more than the crowd that came to the wedding I barely remember, the one where I wore white and believed in forever without understanding what forever actually required.
Harrison’s mother is crying before anything has even started, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief that has his father’s initials embroidered in the corner.
The friends who stayed through the ugly middle fill the rest of the chairs.
Val goes first.
She takes her job as flower girl very seriously, scattering petals with the concentration of a surgeon, making sure each one lands exactly where she wants it. When she reaches the front she turns and gives me a thumbs up, like we’re in on a secret together.
We are, I suppose. The secret is that her parents almost lost each other, and that this ending was never guaranteed. The secret is that she’ll never have to know how close we came to chairs on opposite sides of a courtroom instead of standing together under an arch.
Then it’s my turn.
There’s no one to give me away, so I give myself. I walk the short white path alone, and it’s only a dozen steps but it takes the whole year to cross, every hard mile of it folded into the distance between the back door and the arch. I walk through all of it toward the man waiting at the end.
Harrison watches me come, and he doesn’t bother hiding a single thing on his face, and there’s a great deal on it. His eyes are wet before I even reach him. His hands, when I put mine into them, are shaking.
“Hi,” he whispers.
“There you are,” I say back.
The officiant is a woman Mom found who says a few gentle things about gardens and weather and the things that grow back after a hard winter, and I hear almost none of it, because Harrison is running his thumb across my knuckles like he’s making sure I’m really here.
When she nods at him, he takes a breath that shudders on the way in.
“I promise to tell you the truth,” he says, his voice steady even as his hands shake in mine. “Even when it’s ugly. Even when it’s hard. Even when I’m afraid of what it might cost me.”
The words land somewhere below my ribs. Truth was what we lost first, before anything else crumbled. Truth was what we rebuilt the whole foundation on. I squeeze his hands and feel him squeeze back.
“I promise to stay,” I say, and my voice isn’t as steady as his. “Even when it hurts. Even when I’m scared. Even when staying is harder than leaving.”
I mean it more than I have ever meant anything, and I watch him hear it, watch it hit him the way his hit me.
The officiant gets as far as “You may,” and never finishes it, because Harrison is already kissing me. It’s soft and brief and full of a promise I intend to keep.
Val cheers so loud I hear her over everything, over the small scatter of applause, over my mother crying into her allergy tissues, over the whole bright garden and the cold front past the property line and the crack of light under a door all the way in Arizona.
I kiss my husband in the sun, and I stay.
Golden Hour (Reprise)
Written by Harrison Hubbard
Performed by Georgina Hubbard & Harrison Hubbard
Produced by Georgina Hubbard
For Valerie, who taught us both how to stay.