Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
SAGE
It’s another perfect day, not a cloud in sight, after two straight days of thunderstorms that had Kathleen on the phone with three different tent companies threatening to reschedule an event four hundred people already RSVP’d to.
The sky woke up scrubbed clean and impossibly blue, like Montana wanted to apologize for almost ruining this day.
Noon’s come and gone by the time I sit down with my coffee, hair down my back and nothing on but a robe, four hours out from a ceremony that feels like both an eternity and no time at all, when Tessa’s voice cuts through the window screen from somewhere out on the lawn, pitched at a volume usually reserved for grass fires.
“He’s loose again! Somebody grab the rope before he eats all the flowers!”
I cross to the window in my robe, coffee sloshing, and there he is.
Felony, grey and sway backed and utterly delighted with himself, standing directly on the white runner that’s supposed to carry me down the aisle, methodically stripping petals off the calla lily arrangement at the end of the second row like it’s a personal buffet set out just for him.
Eli’s got one end of a lead rope. Tate’s got the other.
Finn’s circling behind the mule’s hindquarters with both arms spread wide, shouting instructions nobody’s following, and West is filming the entire catastrophe instead of helping, because apparently even on my wedding day some things never change.
“Get him off the aisle,” Knox yells, sprinting across the lawn in a T-shirt and dress pants, sock feet, because nobody puts on their good shoes a second before they absolutely have to. “Not through the flowers, around the flowers.”
“He doesn’t listen to directional cues, Knox, he’s a donkey, not a golden retriever.”
“Mule,” Tate corrects, breathless, still holding his end of the rope like it’s a live wire. “He’s a mule. Get it right or I’m telling Rae you called him a donkey again.”
I watch three grown men, all raised on cattle ranches, lose a tactical engagement to a hundred and fifty pounds of pure spite, and I laugh hard enough that my mom has to steady my shoulder from behind before I spill coffee down the front of my robe.
I’m reaching for yesterday’s jeans crumpled on the chair, ready to go add my own hands to the chaos, when she catches my wrist without even looking up.
“Don’t you dare,” she says, already reaching for the mug. “Not on the one morning it matters.”
She’s been with me since sunrise, quiet like she’s always quiet, the kind of quiet that isn’t absence, just economy.
My mother doesn’t fill a room with words.
She fills it by being unmistakably there.
She is peace personified and the reason I practice yoga.
I’m hoping, someday, I will be as chill as her.
Out the window, Felony finally gives up the fight the second Rae shows up with a bucket of grain, because even a mule has a price, and the lawn crew descends on the ruined runner section with the calm efficiency of men who have clearly done this before, replacing three yards of white fabric before I’ve finished my coffee.
“That’s the second act of God this wedding’s survived in two days,” I say. “First the storms, now livestock.”
“Third,” Josephine says, without looking up from the dress laid across my bed. “Nobody told you about the fire ants at the tent stakes at five this morning.”
“There were fire ants?”
“There were fire ants. There are no longer fire ants.” She says it plain and final, closing the subject before it can grow legs.
Tate knocks and has me step into the hallway before the hairstylist shows up, phone already out. He tells me the wedding camera system took a firmware update at two in the morning that nobody authorized, not Dawson, not West, not him.
He says it fast and quiet, the way you hand somebody a fact you’ve already decided not to let ruin their day, and then he says the whole system’s been pulled and rebuilt from scratch since sunrise and there are four of our own people on the tree line who weren’t there yesterday.
I thank him. I don’t tell my mother. I go get my hair done with a cold spot sitting square in the middle of my back that no amount of August sun is going to warm up.
The next three hours disappear, hairstylist and makeup chair and Kathleen popping in twice to ask about seating charts nobody can fix now. My phone buzzes on the vanity somewhere in the middle of it, and I catch Dawson’s name before the makeup artist swats my hand away from my own face.
West already swept the tree line twice. Erin’s team’s been through it three times. You’re safe. I just need you to hurry up and marry me before I lose my mind standing around in this tux doing nothing useful.
I already know what’s underneath that dress and I still can’t wait to find out again.
Heat climbs up my neck fast enough that the makeup artist mutters something about my color under her breath.
I type back one line before Bree, my college roommate, leans over my shoulder and reads it out loud to the entire room, and I have to physically wrestle the phone out of her hands while Cora cheers like she’s at a hockey game.
By the time the light outside has shifted gold and the clock on the nightstand reads a half hour to go, Josephine unzips the dress bag she’s been guarding since sunrise like a woman handling something sacred.
“Come here. Let’s get you into this.”
The dress is my mother’s. Simple, floor length, ivory silk that’s held its color better than thirty-three years should allow, a neckline that skims the tops of my breasts in front and a back that doesn’t try to hide anything at all, cut low enough to bare my whole spine, skirt moving like water when I turn.
She wore it marrying my father in a ceremony half this size and twice as tense, two families who’d already spent a generation pretending to hate each other standing in the same room and calling it a truce.
My hair is swept back into a low knot at the nape of my neck, every piece smooth, and I understand why the second I see it in the mirror.
With my hair out of the way there’s nothing left to hide the back of the dress, or the thin gold chain Dawson had made for me, simple, my name and his stamped small enough that only someone standing close would ever read it.
She lays a lace veil over the whole of it last, a length long enough to pool on the floor behind me when I walk, sheer enough at the front that it never once touches my face. It’s meant to trail. Not to hide.
I stand still while she fastens the small hook at the nape of my neck, the only closure the dress has, her fingers steady even though I can feel, through my own skin, the moment her breath catches.
We already fitted this dress on me three weeks ago, every seam marked and taken in until it hung exactly right, so there’s nothing left to check and nothing left to fix.
She checks anyway, turning me by the shoulders until I’m facing her instead of the mirror, and her eyes go bright and wet taking in the whole of it, her daughter standing in the same silk she once stood in herself.
“You’re crying.”
“I’m fine.” Her voice doesn’t agree with her. She blinks hard, once, and doesn’t look away from me while she does it. Up close her eyes are mine, whiskey brown gone gold at the edges, the inheritance nobody can argue with no matter which family name sits on top of it.
“Two chairs are back at the head table today,” she says. “Yours and Dawson’s. There was one at that table the day I married your father that should have had a name attached and never did. Mine.”
I don’t move. I don’t ask her to explain it. I’ve heard enough of this family’s careful silences over the years to know when one is finally about to end, and I know better than to rush a woman who has never once wasted a word in her life.
“My mother’s people were living on this land before Elias Blackwater or Seamus Sullivan ever staked a claim to a single acre of it,” she says.
“Not one plaque on this property says so. Not the Ledger. Not one page of this family’s history, in either family’s version of it.
I watched two families spend generations fighting a war that never once made sense to me up close, while the people who actually knew this valley first got left out of whatever understanding those two men really built between themselves. ”
“Mom.” My fingers find hers.
“I’m not telling you this to ruin your morning.
” She smooths one hand down my sleeve, the same gesture she’s used on me since I was small enough to need steadying before school photos.
“I’m telling you because you asked me once, a long time ago, whether I was ever angry that I married into a story that already had an ending written before I arrived.
I never answered you honestly. I’m answering you now. ”
“Are you angry?”
“I’m patient.” Her hand finds my jaw, and her grip is stronger than I expect, sure and brief, gone almost as fast as it lands. “Ask me again when there’s a Blackfeet name back at that table. Not a guest. A name that belongs there.”
She releases my face and steps back before I can answer, before either of us has to decide what answering would set in motion. It stays with me anyway, heavy and patient, for the rest of my wedding day.
“You look just like her,” she says instead, nodding at the mirror. “My mother. Same jaw. Same refusal to look away first.”
“I inherited the refusal from you.”
“You inherited it from all of us. That’s the whole point of a family, Sage. Nobody gets to keep the good parts to themselves.”
Mackenzie finds me twenty minutes later in a dress the exact shade of the calla lilies stacked in buckets on every surface of the house, blush pink deepening at the hem, cut different from Tessa’s off the shoulder version and Cora’s halter and Laney’s sweetheart neckline, because that was the one rule Kathleen actually enforced.
Same color, whatever silhouette makes you feel unstoppable in it.