23. Aster
— ? —
Aster
Three days is how long I’ve got to finish what I started up here before the wedding. I fly out on the Tuesday of the week while Flora stays behind to close out the last of it, the dress and the flowers and the ten people we’ve spent six weeks making sure can actually come.
Amora is on the porch when I arrive.
“You look terrible,” she says, by way of greeting.
“Good to see you too.”
“I assume you’re here to finish my shed.”
“I’m here to finish your shed.”
She nods, satisfied. “Tools are in the barn. There’s lemonade. Try not to bleed on anything this time.”
The shed is exactly the way I left it, half-built and slightly crooked, a monument to a man who had never held a hammer before this year.
It’s further along than it was when I started and I’ve read that framing manual enough times by now that I almost know what I’m doing, and almost is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The cabin has a bed made up in it and a mug on the windowsill with a ring in the bottom that I’m fairly sure is mine from the last time I was here.
Amora hasn’t touched a thing. I don’t know whether that’s sentiment or whether she really hasn’t been in here since I left, and I’m not going to ask, because with her the answer could be either and she’d enjoy not telling me.
I work from first light until I can’t see the nails, then fall into that bed and do it again the next morning. My hands are a disaster, blisters on top of calluses on top of more blisters, and everything from my shoulders down aches, and I don’t stop.
This matters more than the songs did.
Not because Amora needs a shed, although she does.
Not because I have something to prove, although I do.
Because I need my wife to see that I can build something.
That I can make a thing with my hands and not just my voice, that there’s a version of me who isn’t only the guy standing in front of a crowd absorbing what they’ll give him.
I want to be the guy who builds her things.
On the second afternoon I get the door hung, and it takes four attempts, and on the fourth one it swings and catches and stays where I put it. I stand in the yard and open and close a door about nine times like an idiot.
There’s nobody to show. That’s the strange part.
In the whole of my adult life I have never made a thing that didn’t immediately go to somebody, a producer or a label or twenty thousand people in a room, and this door is going to be opened by a woman in her sixties who wants to get a rake out.
That’s the entire audience. That’s the whole point of it.
On the third morning, Amora finds me on the roof.
“It’s crooked,” she says.
“I know.”
“The door doesn’t quite close.”
“I know.”
“There’s a gap in the back wall that’s going to let in every insect in this state.”
“I know, Amora.” I sit back on my heels and wipe my face. “It isn’t perfect. It’s never going to be perfect. But it’s finished.”
She studies it for a long moment.
“You know I have a nephew in Rutland who could have put this up in a weekend,” she says.
“I’m aware.”
“I could have called him in June.”
“You could have.”
“I didn’t.” She looks at the thing, crooked and gapped and standing up on its own. Then she smiles, which she does about twice a season.
“It’s not bad,” she allows. “For a first attempt.”
“High praise.”
“Don’t let it go to your head.” She hands me the lemonade. “Her plane lands at three. I suggest a shower. You smell like a barn animal.”
I shower. I put on clean clothes. I pace her kitchen like something in a cage until I hear a car coming up the drive.
Then I go and get the blindfold from the cabin.
Flora’s eyebrows go up when she sees it. “What’s this?”
“Do you trust me?”
She hesitates. Just for a second, long enough that I feel it, and then her face softens. “Yes.”
I tie it carefully and take her hand and lead her through the garden, past the vegetable beds and the chicken coop and the patch of lawn where I bled all over her mother’s grass in the summer.
We stop in front of the shed.
“Ready?” I ask.
“Just show me already.”
I take the blindfold off.
She stares.
It’s small, one room, maybe ten by twelve.
But I’ve spent the last day turning the inside of it into something.
The panels and the desk came on a truck last week, and Amora signed for them and didn’t ask.
Acoustic panels on the walls. A guitar on a stand in the corner.
A desk under the window that looks out over her mother’s beds.
And above the desk, framed, a photograph from our wedding three years ago, Flora laughing with Amora, completely unaware that anybody was looking at her.
“You built this,” she says.
“I built this.” I come to stand next to her.
“It isn’t perfect. The door sticks and the roof might leak and I’m fairly sure the whole thing is off level.
But it’s the first thing I’ve ever made with my hands.
” I gesture at the inside of it. “It’s a studio.
For writing. Here, on your mother’s land, because that’s where about half of everything I make from now on is going to happen. ”
“Aster.”
“I meant what I said on that stage.” I turn her to face me. “I’m done being somewhere else. You’re my home. You’ve been my home since a diner at two in the morning, and I want to put roots down wherever you happen to be standing.”
She kisses me. Long and deep, her hands gripping my shirt, her whole body against mine. We get through the door together somehow and she pushes me down onto the small couch I dragged in yesterday and climbs into my lap without letting go of my mouth.
“We’re getting married in four hours,” she says against my lips.
“Then we should make it count.”
We don’t rush.
I kiss her again, slow and thorough, my hands sliding under her dress to cup her ass.
I kiss down her neck while I pull the dress up and off, and then I take my time with her breasts, my mouth on one nipple and my hand on the other, and she gasps and grinds down against me through my pants.
I laugh against her skin because the couch is too small and her knee keeps hitting the armrest, and she laughs too and keeps kissing me.
I get her completely naked and she helps me shove my pants down just far enough, and then she sinks down onto me with a moan, taking me inch by inch while I kiss her mouth and then her neck as she starts to move.
She rides me slow with her hands on my shoulders for balance. The couch creaks and we ignore it.
“I love you,” I tell her.
“I love you too.” Her hands tighten on my shoulders. “Now stop talking.”
So I stop talking.
I keep my mouth on her breasts while she rides, moving between them, and she comes the first time like that, clenching around me with her head dropping forward as she shakes, and I hold her hips and keep her moving through it.
She doesn’t stop. She rides me faster, kissing me deep and messy, and I reach between us and rub her clit with my thumb while she moves.
She comes again, harder this time, moaning into my mouth, and I thrust up into her from below, chasing my own release while I keep my thumb on her and my mouth on hers.
I come deep inside her with a groan, both of us pressed together on the tiny couch until the shaking fades.
Afterward we lie tangled on a couch that is far too small for two adults, listening to birds and to Amora doing something in the garden that involves a bucket.
“We should get ready,” Flora says.
“We should.”
Neither of us moves.
“It’s really happening,” she says quietly. “We’re really doing this again.”
“Second thoughts?”
“No.” She tips her head back to look at me. “Just taking it in. Three months ago I thought our marriage was finished. I was so angry I couldn’t see, and I was completely certain you were never going to change.”
“I hadn’t given you a single reason to think anything else.”
“No. You’re giving me reasons now.” She traces a line down my chest. “It’s different this time.”
“I’m different this time.”
“You are.” She smiles. “I like this one.”
“I like any version of me that gets to wake up next to you.”
We eventually peel ourselves off the couch and make ourselves presentable, and there is still a great deal to do.
The ceremony happens in the garden as the sun starts going down.
There are ten chairs in two rows. Dylan.
Mara, who has called my wife every day for longer than I’ve deserved her and who hugged me so hard when she arrived that I felt something in my back move.
Three people from Flora’s shelter who knew her before anybody called her Aster Golding’s wife.
A few people from the town who have somehow become ours over the summer, including the man with the gray beard who handed me a guitar at a farmers market and has no idea what he set in motion.
Dylan stands up with me because he’s the closest thing I have to a brother. Flora asked her mother to stand with her.
Amora officiates, because of course she does.
“Dearly beloved,” she begins, delivering it with total solemnity in a flowing purple dress and more crystals than I have ever seen on one person, “we are gathered here today, in a garden where I have grown tomatoes for twenty years and where my son-in-law very nearly took his own hand off building that shed over there.”
Flora snorts. I elbow her.
“To witness the marriage of two people who have already done this once and are apparently gluttons for punishment.”
“Mom,” Flora hisses.
“What? It’s true.” Amora looks between us. “You’ve already stood up in front of people and made promises. You’ve already broken them. You’ve already hurt each other and disappointed each other and let each other down badly.” She pauses. “So why are you doing it again?”
The question sits there in the air.
“Because we learned,” I say. “The first time, I didn’t know what I was promising. I thought marriage meant turning up for the wedding and that the rest of it would sort itself out. I didn’t understand that you have to keep choosing her. Every single day. Especially on the days when it’s hard.”
“And you?” Amora asks her daughter.
Flora’s hand tightens in mine. “Because I spent the worst month of my life trying to hate him and I couldn’t do it.
” Her voice catches. “Because when I tried to imagine a future without him in it, there was nothing there. And because he built me a shed, Mom. He’d never built anything in his life and he did it anyway, badly, for weeks, so I’d have proof he could make something that stays. ”
Amora smiles. “Good answers.” She produces a piece of paper from somewhere in her sleeves.
“I prepared traditional vows and I don’t think you need them.
I think you’ve just said the whole thing.
” She looks at me. “Aster. Do you promise to keep choosing her? Even when you’re tired.
Even when it’s hard. Even when there’s a stage somewhere with your name on it. ”
“I do.”
“Flora. Do you promise to keep choosing him too, for as long as he keeps earning it? And to leave again, without apology, if he ever makes you?”
“I do.”
“Then by the power vested in me by the internet, and yes I got ordained online, Flora did it for me on the hill with one bar of signal, it’s perfectly legal, I pronounce you married. Again. For hopefully the last time.” She waves a hand at us. “Kiss already.”
I kiss her.
Ten people cheer. Somebody gets a cork out. The setting sun turns the whole garden gold and pink and slightly unreal.
“Hello, wife,” I say when we finally come apart.
“Hello, husband.” Her smile is enormous. “Think it’ll stick this time?”
“I’m going to make absolutely sure of it.”
The reception is food from the market and a cake from the bakery in town and dancing to whatever’s playing off somebody’s phone. I turn my wife around her mother’s garden while Amora watches from a chair, Mara takes roughly eight hundred photographs, and Dylan pretends he isn’t crying.
Much later, after everybody has gone and Amora has retreated to her room, we stand in the doorway of the shed.
“It really is crooked,” Flora says.
“I know.”
“And the door doesn’t shut.”
“I’m aware.”
“I love it.” She turns to look at me. “More than anything you could have bought or paid somebody to make. Because you made it.”
“I’d build you a hundred more.”
“Start with this one.” She takes my hand and pulls me inside. “Come and show me how it sounds with something in it.”
I take the guitar off the stand and settle onto the couch and start playing something soft, something new, something that’s been moving around in my head for a few days.
Flora curls up against my shoulder and listens.
“That’s new,” she says.
“It’s for the album.”
“What album?”
“The one I’ll record eventually. When I feel like it.” I kiss her hair. “No deadline. No tour attached. Just songs when they turn up, and this room, and you.”
“What’s it called?”
I smile. “What do you think?”
She’s quiet for a second. Then she laughs, soft and warm.
“Flora,” she says.
“Flora,” I confirm.
Outside, the moon comes up over her mother’s garden. Inside, I play my wife a song about coming home.