Chapter 32 #3
I’ve watched Liam O’Connell take a puck to the face and not change expression.
I once saw him finish a shift with a separated shoulder and argue with the trainer about coming off.
The man is granite. And I watched him fall apart, completely, silently, the instant he saw her — his hand coming up to his mouth, his eyes going bright, his whole granite composure just gone.
Because Anne was — there’s no other word for it — luminous.
I couldn’t have told you a single thing about the dress, honestly.
White. Long. Some kind of fabric trailing behind her that caught the last of the June sun coming through the glass.
I only know it was the kind of thing that makes a whole room go quiet, because ours did.
She’d done something with her hair. She was crying already. She looked, walking through all that greenery in the gold evening light, like something the greenhouse had grown on purpose.
Finn, from his post near the front, said “that’s my mom” to no one in particular, in a voice thick with six-year-old awe, and the back rows lost it.
Liam didn’t take his eyes off her the entire walk. Not once. When her father handed her over and Liam took both her hands, I heard him say, very quietly, just for her, “There you are.” Like he’d been waiting his whole life for her to come around that corner. Like he’d have waited longer.
I thought about what was waiting in my sock drawer at home, and I thought: soon.
They said their vows and Liam got through about half of his before his voice went, this big steady mountain of a man coming apart at the words I will always come home to you, and Anne reached up and wiped his face with her thumb before she said hers, and everyone gathered under the glass made that wet collective sound, and I stood there waiting for my cue and losing the battle with my own face.
“The rings,” the officiant said.
Both boys stepped forward with their pillows, solemn as honor guards, and there was a small delay while the rings were unpicked from their thread — Justin with Anne’s, Finn with Liam’s, each boy presenting his charge with the ceremonial care of a knight surrendering a sword — and I took Anne’s band from Justin and handed it off, and passed Liam the ring he’d need, and for one second Liam looked at me — really looked at me, the way he had in the locker room in the fall when I’d been drowning and he’d been worried — and something passed between us that didn’t need words. Look at us, it said.
Look how far. You made it, brother.
“Thanks,” Liam murmured, taking the ring.
“Don’t drop it,” I murmured back, and he almost laughed, and the moment held us both up.
He slid it onto Anne’s finger. He said the words.
She said hers back, and put his ring on with shaking hands, and then the officiant said the thing everybody waits for, and Liam kissed his wife while a greenhouse full of hockey players and their families lost its collective mind, and Finn yelled something triumphant, and Justin — I heard it clear across the room — Justin yelled “ROGER THAT,” which was becoming the boy’s answer to every large moment in life, and everybody laughed through their tears.
I clapped until my hands hurt. My teammate. My friend. Married, in the light.
Outside afterward, on the warm bright lawn in front of the Jewel Box while everybody threw the biodegradable confetti Anne had researched exhaustively, Mark found me.
He was in a suit. Barbara had clearly won that argument too.
He put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me for a second with an expression I’d only seen on him a handful of times in fifteen years.
“You did good up there,” he said. “Standing up with him. Didn’t drop a thing.” He paused, working up to something. “You’re going to be good at the other part too. The standing-up-front part. When it’s your turn.”
“Mark—”
“I’m not asking when. He squeezed my shoulder.”I just want you to know that when you do it — wherever, however — Barbara and I will be there. Front row.
We wouldn’t miss it for anything on this earth. His eyes were bright, and he looked away, out across the lawn, at Barbara laughing with Jess, at the two boys chasing confetti across the summer grass. “We didn’t get to give you much, son. Foster system doesn’t leave you a lot to give.
But we get to give you this. We get to sit in the front row and watch you get everything you were told you’d never have. You have no idea what that’s worth to a couple of old people from Ames.”
I couldn’t say anything.
“So don’t take too long,” Mark said, gruff, blinking hard. “We’re not getting any younger, and I’ve got a suit now, and I’d hate to only wear it once.”
I pulled him into a hug, right there on the grass with the glass house glowing behind us, this man who had saved my life without ever once making me feel like I owed him for it, and he held on hard, and over his shoulder I could see Jess watching us with her hand pressed to her chest, and Justin barreling toward both of us at full speed for reasons known only to him, and I thought:
Spring. I’ll do it in spring. When the season’s done and the world thaws out.
Front row. Mark’s suit. Jess in the light.
Soon.