Chapter 27 Mara — Day 173
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The dress fits.
That's the first thing I think, standing in front of the long mirror in my bedroom while Opal pins my hair. It's not a fancy dress. Ivory and simple, with a neckline that shows my collarbones and a hem that stops above my boots so I can walk in the pasture without leaving fabric on the mesquite.
“Hold still,” Opal says.
“I'm holding still.”
“You're breathing.”
“I'm told that's important.”
She snorts. Her hands are quick against the back of my head, doing something with pins and a small sprig of rosemary from the kitchen garden.
My braid's loose today. Not tight the way I wear it working.
Softer. Bastien asked for that once, a month ago, not making a demand of it, saying he liked how it looked coming undone.
I've thought about that a lot since.
“There,” Opal says. She steps back. Her eyes are wet and she's pretending they're not. “You look like your mother.”
“You never met my mother.”
“I've seen the one picture. I don't need more than that.” She fusses at the shoulder of the dress, which doesn't need fussing. “You look like her, and you look like your father, and you look like yourself. That's more than enough.”
I turn toward her. “Opal —”
“Don't.” She waves me off. “If you thank me I'll cry, and then the bread will burn, and I haven't spent three days on that bread to burn it. Go.”
I go.
In the hall I stop to check my father's leather watch. Still on my left wrist. Where I put it this morning. Where it should be. I go.
The kitchen is warm and full. Rafe's there in a suit that's too short in the sleeve and too long in the leg, arguing quietly with Orin about which pocket the ring goes in. Rafe's arm moves the way it's supposed to now. No brace, no wince. He healed clean.
“Ma'am,” Orin says when he sees me. His face goes pink under his freckles. “You look — ma'am, you look —”
“Nice work, Keats,” Rafe says. “Real complete thought there.”
“You look beautiful,” Orin says, all in a rush. “Ma'am.”
“Thank you, Orin.” I bend and fix his tie, which is crooked, because his hands were shaking too hard to get it straight. “You clean up all right yourself.”
“He wanted to wear his hat,” Rafe says.
“I wanted to wear my hat,” Orin agrees.
“You'll live,” I say.
Thayer's by the door. He's the only one in a suit that fits, gray and simple, turning a small folded piece of paper in his hand like he wrote something down and can't decide whether he'll be brave enough to say it.
“Ready?” he says, and his voice is a little rougher than usual.
“Ready.”
He offers his arm. I take it. His forearm is solid under my hand, the way my father's used to be.
“He'd be proud of you, Mara,” Thayer says.
I have to look at the door for a second before I trust my voice. “I know.”
“Good,” Thayer says. “Let's go get you married.”
The pasture west of the barn's been mowed.
The grass is short and the wildflowers are coming up along the fence line, orange and gold and white.
Somebody — Cassia, probably — strung a garland from the fence posts, cedar and yellow ribbon, nothing that took itself too seriously.
The chairs are borrowed from the church in Alpine. Most of them are already filled.
There's music. A single guitar, played by a friend of Rafe's from Marfa. Slow and clean.
The aisle is the pasture. That's all. The strip of ground between the chairs.
At the end of it, Bastien is waiting.
He's in dark blue. His hat is off, in his left hand, over his heart. His hair is a little too long the way it's always been, and it moves when the wind comes off the mesa. His shoulders are set the way they set when he's trying not to give himself away. He's giving himself away.
He sees me, and every guarded line in his face gives way at once. I've loved that surrender for a long time now.
Thayer walks me down slowly enough to let me see everyone.
Opal is in the front row already crying.
Beside her sits Leonie Lorne in dove-gray, one hand over her mouth, exactly where I asked her to sit after our first careful phone call.
Selene from the bank wears a dress instead of her usual blazer.
Veda's hat could take out an eye. Cassia — ordained online, paperwork filed with the county — waits at the altar in a long white shirt over jeans, holding a small book from her own store.
Renata, my maid of honor, stands beside her in soft green, trying to laugh and cry at once.
Rafe and Orin flanking Bastien. Orin standing at attention like he's been drafted. Rafe trying very hard to look serious and failing in a way I'll tease him about for the rest of my life.
I get to Bastien. Thayer puts my hand in his and steps back.
“Hi,” Bastien says, so quiet only I hear it.
“Hi,” I say back.
Cassia clears her throat. “We're here,” she says, in her clear teacher voice, “to marry two people who took the long way to each other. Which is fine. Sometimes the long way is the only way that holds.”
She reads a poem. Short. About a river.
Then she looks at Bastien. “You wanted to go first. You still want to?”
“Yes,” Bastien says.
He turns to me. He lifts my hand a little so it's between us, both of ours, thumbs touching.
“Mara,” he says. Then: “I'll say it in French first, and then in English, so you'll know what you're agreeing to.”
A small ripple of laughter runs through the chairs. He waits it out.
Then he says the vows in French.
I don't have the language. I catch pieces. Toujours. Tienne. His voice is different in French — softer, older, like it belongs to a version of him I never got to know. I watch his mouth make the shapes. I don't need to understand every word to hear what he's telling me. His eyes don't leave mine.
He stumbles once in the middle. Says a word, stops, starts it again with a small sheepish smile at himself. Somebody in the back — Rafe, I know it's Rafe — lets out a quiet approving whistle, and Bastien's mouth twitches, and the whole pasture laughs, warm, and he keeps going.
Then he switches.
“I promise you the truth,” he says in English, and his voice is steady.
“The whole of it. In the good weather and the bad.
I promise you my work and my hands and my quiet.
I promise I'll come home. I promise, when I'm afraid, I'll say so.
I promise I'll ask before I decide anything that touches you.
I promise I'll learn what you need and I'll learn it again when it changes.”
He is quiet a moment more.
“I promise to love you the way you love this land,” he says. “Which is with everything.”
Opal makes a small sound in the front row.
Then it's my turn. I didn't write mine down. I've been chewing on it for a week and I know what I want to say.
“Bastien,” I say. My voice is lower than I want it. I clear my throat. “I don't have French.”
“That's all right,” he says.
“I have this.” I look at him. The pasture — my pasture, our pasture — moving in the wind behind him. “I spent a long time trying to hold this place up alone because I thought that was the only way it counted. Then you walked up my drive.”
I watch his throat move.
“I promise you I'll stop being alone at it,” I say. “That's a bigger promise than it sounds, from me. You know it is.”
“I do,” he says.
“I promise you my honesty. You had to earn the right to it.
You did. I promise you the barn in the morning and the porch in the evening and my hands when yours are cold.
I promise I'll fight for you. I promise I'll fight with you when I need to.
I promise, when you're afraid, you can tell me, and I'll listen without fixing.”
I try to smile. It comes out wobbly.
“I promise to love you,” I say, “the way you loved me. Quiet, and stubborn, and out loud when it counts. Which is now.”
Bastien's eyes are wet. He doesn't look away.
Cassia clears her throat again, gently. “The rings.”
Orin fumbles in the wrong pocket first, then the right one. Rafe mutters something at him. Orin's face is now the color of a barn. He hands the small gold band to Bastien.
Bastien slides it onto my finger. A plain gold band. Nothing about it that shows off. It's what I asked for.
I slide his onto his.
“Then,” Cassia says, “by the authority of the state of Texas and by the say-so of everybody who loves you both — kiss her, cowboy.”
He does.
He puts his hands on my face, warm, careful, and kisses me the way he kisses me — long and slow and without any hurry, like he has all the light he needs.
My hand goes to his wrist. His other hand slides to the small of my back.
He kisses me long enough that somebody starts whistling — Rafe again, obviously — and then more people join in, and Opal starts laughing, and Bastien smiles against my mouth and doesn't stop.
When he finally lets me go there's a round of applause and a lot of noise. I press my forehead to his for one breath.
“Hi, Mrs. Lorne,” he says, only to me.
“Hi, Mr. Lorne. Only in here, though. Out there you're still Beau.”
He laughs. “Out there, I'm still Beau.”
The yard between the house and the barn has been turned into something out of a magazine I'd normally roll my eyes at.
Long trestle tables borrowed from three ranches.
White cloths. Wildflowers in Mason jars.
String lights strung from the porch to the barn to the big cottonwood and back, not yet turned on because the sun hasn't sat down.
Opal has laid the food along the porch railing.
There's a lot of it. There is, in particular, a mountain of rosemary bread on a long board — round loaves, oval loaves, small rolls with rosemary sprigs pressed into their tops.
Enough to feed a hundred people if they eat until they hurt, which Opal is planning on.
The smell drifts across the yard like she designed it that way. She probably did.
I catch her by the elbow as I pass.
“Opal.”
“Don't,” she says.
“You made bread for a hundred people.”
“I made bread for a hundred people because a hundred people love you. Now sit down before you fall down. And eat some of it. You're too thin.”