50. Jake
JAKE
A year ago I fixed a fence to keep a stranger out. Today I am hanging a sign that welds our two families into one.
I had the sign leaning against the porch rail that morning, wrapped in an old moving blanket so nobody would see it early, while Deacon stood behind me in the bathroom mirror trying to talk my tie into behaving.
"Hold still. You're worse than the goose."
"The goose never had to marry anyone."
"The goose has more sense than either of us put together, and he's about to be here in a bow tie, so watch your mouth." Deacon yanked the knot tight enough to make me cough, then loosened it half an inch, studying his own work like he was leveling a beam.
"There. Presentable. Mostly."
"High praise."
"You want flattery, marry a poet." He clapped me once on the shoulder and met my eyes in the mirror, and for a second the joking dropped out of his face entirely. "You good?"
"I've never been better in my life."
"Good answer." He picked lint off my jacket that wasn't there, an excuse to keep his hands busy.
"Emily would have liked her. You know that, right? She'd have liked how Aria doesn't let you get away with anything."
I hadn't expected to hear that name today, and for a moment my throat did something complicated. Deacon had never once said it lightly in all the years I'd known him, and he wasn't saying it lightly now.
"Yeah," I said, when I could. "I think she would have."
"Noah put a flower behind her picture this morning. Didn't say why. Didn't have to."
Deacon straightened, businesslike again, done letting either of us sit in it too long. "Now go marry your neighbor before she comes looking for you herself. That woman does not wait well."
The garden had stopped being two gardens sometime in the last eight months, though I couldn't have told you the exact day it happened.
The fence panel that used to mark the property line was gone now, hauled off to Deacon's shop and turned into something else entirely.
In its place ran an open stretch of grass that belonged to both houses at once, string lights crossing overhead in slow loops from one roofline to the other.
Folding chairs stood in uneven rows under the apple tree, half of them borrowed from Bev's diner, and somewhere past the gate a very old, very good speaker system Marcus had rigged was playing something low enough not to compete with the birds.
Somewhere near the folding tables, someone had set a slow cooker of Carol's baked beans right beside a tray of Bev's pie, an alliance that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago and now looked like the most natural thing in the world.
The arbor stood at the center of it, same as it had for a year now, ARIA still carved into the crossbeam where I'd left it, and Noah's drawing hanging just beside it in a new frame, because the old one had finally worn out from being taken down and put back up so many times over the past year.
Carol found me before I'd made it halfway down the aisle of chairs, already dressed, already crying, already pretending she wasn't.
"You look like your grandfather," she said, straightening a lapel that did not need straightening. "He used to stand exactly like that when he was nervous. Feet too far apart, like the ground might give out on him."
"I'm not nervous."
"You're a terrible liar, Jake Hartley. Always have been." She patted my chest twice, flat-palmed, the same gesture she'd used on me for years whenever words weren't quite enough.
"I'm proud of you. I don't say that nearly enough, so I'm saying it now, before the day gets away from us."
"You raised half this family without ever being asked to."
"Nobody had to ask. That's not how it works." She looked past me toward the house, where I could hear Aria's voice through an open window, laughing at something, and Carol's whole face softened the way it only ever did around the people she'd decided belonged to her.
"Now go stand under that arbor before I have to walk you there myself."
Diane had flown in three days earlier and had already talked Carol into swapping casserole recipes, the two of them thick as thieves within an hour of meeting, which told me everything I needed to know about how today was going to go.
She caught my arm on my way past and pressed something small and hard into my palm, a button off Aria's father's old coat, the only thing of his she'd kept.
"She doesn't know I have this," Diane said. "Put it somewhere on you. Don't tell her until after."
I didn't ask why. Some things you just do.
By the time I reached the arbor, the chairs had filled in behind me with more people than I'd expected to fit in one backyard, and Noah stood at my side in a small gray suit he'd picked out himself, a velvet pillow balanced flat on both palms like it might tip.
"You ready?" I asked him.
"I've been ready for a year," he said, plain as anything, the same steady voice that still occasionally stopped me cold, because I remembered exactly how long it had taken for him to find a voice at all. "Lily's going to throw the flowers too hard. I already told her not to."
"She's not going to listen."
"No," he agreed. "She never does."
He wasn't wrong. Lily came down the aisle a minute later in a dress the color of the apple tree in spring, hurling entire fistfuls of petals at once instead of the gentle sprinkle Carol had rehearsed with her twice, grinning like she'd just discovered the greatest job in the world and had no intention of doing it properly.
One handful landed square on the officiant's face.
Nobody minded.
"She's technically six now," I heard someone whisper behind me, "which apparently means the quarters don't count anymore."
Then the music shifted, and Aria came through the gate on her mother's arm, and every rehearsed thought I'd had about how this moment would go left my head at once.
She wore something simple and ivory, nothing like the clothes that hadn't survived the sprinkler system the first day we met, and she was laughing before she even reached me, already undone by the sight of Lily's petal massacre scattered across half the aisle.
When she got close enough, she leaned in instead of waiting for the officiant to invite it.
"You look terrified," she whispered.
"I look thrilled. Try again."
"You look like a man about to fall over a broken trellis."
"I already did that once. Caught myself that time."
She laughed, quiet enough that only I heard it, and took my hand, and something in my chest that had been holding its breath for longer than I wanted to admit finally let go.
The ceremony itself went the way ceremonies do, vows exchanged, rings passed from Noah's careful hands to ours, the officiant saying words I only half heard because I was too busy watching Aria's face do the thing it does when she's trying not to cry and losing.
But partway through, Carol stepped forward, unplanned by anyone but herself, and the whole garden went quiet enough to hear the apple tree shifting overhead.
"I have loved and lost enough in this life to know exactly what I'm talking about when I say this," she said, "so hear the truth nobody tells you at weddings. Love doesn't fix anything by itself. It just gives you somebody worth doing the fixing with."
She looked between us, steady, unhurried, the same directness she'd worn into every hard conversation this family had ever needed. "These two did the hard part already, out loud, in this exact garden, more than once." She looked at Noah, then at Lily, then back at us.
"These children did not get a vote in any of it, and they picked you anyway, both of them, more than once. Do right by that." She straightened, done, satisfied.
"What's left is easy. Go be happy. That's the whole blessing. Go be happy, and let the rest of us watch."
Nobody had a dry eye left after that, including Carol, who pretended otherwise and stepped back into her seat like she hadn't just leveled the entire yard.
The reception ran long and loose under the lights, tables dragged out from both kitchens, Bev's cooking next to Carol's like the two of them had called a temporary truce for the occasion. Deacon stood when the toasts started, glass raised, entirely too pleased with himself.
"I offered this man a banner off the water tower," he announced, to a scattering of laughter that told me half this crowd had already heard the story.
"Skywriting. A mariachi band. He turned down every single one of my genuinely excellent ideas and built a gate instead, which I want the record to show was my second favorite plan."
He turned to look at me, and for once the performance dropped out of his voice entirely.
"I've known this man since before either of us could grow a beard worth mentioning.
I watched him lose more than any person should have to lose, and I watched him build his way back from it one board at a time, because that's the only language he's ever fully trusted.
Aria, you didn't just marry a good man. You married the only one I know who'll rebuild your whole life and never once mention the bill. "
He raised his glass higher. "To Jake and Aria. May the goose never learn to open doors."
Right on cue, and I will swear to this for the rest of my life, Gerald came barreling through the open gate at a dead run, chasing something only he could see, and the entire reception dissolved into the kind of laughter that makes your ribs hurt.
Later, once the plates had cleared and the kids had finally worn themselves down enough to sit still, Aria found me by the fence line that used to divide us and pulled me a few steps away from the noise.
"I have to tell you something," she said, "and I've been waiting all day for the right moment, and I've decided there isn't one, so I'm just going to say it."
"You're worrying me."
"Don't be worried. Be something else." She took my hand and pressed it flat against her stomach, and for a second I didn't understand, and then I understood completely.
"I wasn't sure until last week. I wanted to be sure before I said anything."
I couldn't find a single word that felt big enough, so I didn't try. I just pulled her in and held on, and somewhere behind us Noah was showing Lily a new drawing by lantern light, and Carol was refilling somebody's glass, and Gerald was almost certainly getting into something he shouldn't.
When the last of the guests had finally gone and the garden had gone still in the particular way it does after a celebration, I carried the sign out from under its blanket and climbed the short ladder Deacon had left leaning against the arbor.
For a moment I just stood there on the top rung, looking down at the yard that used to be two separate ones and was now unmistakably a single piece of ground, string lights still glowing overhead, the last of the folding chairs stacked against a fence line that no longer marked anything at all.
I hung the sign, HARTLEY-MITCHELL, carved crooked on purpose because I did it myself and I wanted her to know that, and looked at my wife, my son, my daughter, and the one still on the way, and thought, I did not lose everything twice. I got everything back, and then some.