Chapter Thirty-Five
Thirty-Five
From the back of a cab on Weymouth Street, I quadruple-check the picture. It’s a shot of Josie’s wedding invitation, white with all sorts of flowers doodled across it—loose and bright and colorful. Campbell sent it to me after booking my flights, his arm settled over my shoulders in his bed.
Now, I look up at his house. Right address. Gray shingled cottage on stilts with a wide front porch and weathered blue shutters. There’s a catering van parked in the driveway and a sandwich board sign by the fence gate:
Welcome to our wedding
Josie even from all this way across the grass, I can see him in her. She looks back at her son, and I watch her lips move. Who is that?
A child runs out of the house, cutting across the lawn in a pink dress. Its skirt is frilly and full. A woman chases her—blond hair, all of it swirled into pins at the back of her head. Blush silky dress floating over the grass at her ankles. Vivian, I think.
The little girl reaches her grandmother before Vivian can catch her, and when she throws her arms around Campbell’s mother it’s with a shrill, bubbling laugh that I hear all the way across the yard.
Vivian puts both hands on the girl’s shoulders, saying something to her mom.
Then she looks at Campbell. Then, slowly, she turns and looks at me.
I try to breathe. Campbell looks so shocked I wonder if I should have told him.
If I was stupid to show up here like this, when I’ve lost my right to feel welcome.
But as we look at each other across the long stretch of grass, he finally pulls his hands out of his pockets and steps around his family.
He doesn’t look away the entire time he walks toward me, like if he blinks I might disappear.
He stops a foot away. So close I can’t see anything but him—the dark spread of his shoulders in the tuxedo jacket, the purple bruise on his forehead.
“You’re here?” he says. It’s a question, one that betrays so much: that he can’t quite believe it, that he’s not sure I’m real. That he didn’t expect this of me, which hurts so sharply. I hate that I’ve become someone who’s let him down.
I want to touch him so keenly that my fingers twitch with it, and I curl my free hand into a fist so I won’t. He doesn’t owe me that. His face, where I want to run my fingertips over his cheek. His chest, where I want to press my palm to his heart. He doesn’t owe me any of him at all.
“I’m here,” I promise.
Campbell swallows. “Mattie—”
“It doesn’t need to mean anything,” I say, quickly.
“And I didn’t come to distract you. I know—” I glance at the house, the yard just past his shoulders.
“I know I’m late, and it’s almost time. We don’t have to talk about it, and you don’t have to forgive me.
It’s just that I told you you wouldn’t have to do this alone.
” I’m shaking, and it’s becoming clear in my voice.
Campbell watches, very carefully, as I draw a breath to steady myself.
“I meant that. I’m here with you. Full send. ”
Campbell considers this. His gaze on my face is almost unbearable, the way he’s searching me.
And then, quietly, he says, “You aren’t late.”
He holds out his hand, and I take it.
Inside the house, it’s like a bomb’s gone off. A very floral, very colorful bomb.
“These at the end of every aisle,” a woman in a black polo shirt says, pointing to potted dahlias.
“Pink and burgundy, every other row.” The three people in front of her heft pots into their arms and disappear into the yard.
With fewer flowers cluttering the space, I can see the hardwood floor—sanded and worn, thin path of it leading to the kitchen.
There are voices there, faint and happy.
The sound of someone on the edge of a laugh.
Campbell tips his head toward it. When we get to the opening that leads into the kitchen, he puts his hand on my back to guide me through. This dress dips so low that his thumb lands on my bare spine. The contact nearly makes me trip as I cross the threshold onto the black-and-white kitchen tile.
“Dad,” Campbell says. “Josie.”
They’re right in front of us: Campbell’s father in a wheelchair, Josie standing across from him with her hips leaned into the counter.
She’s grinning, gorgeous, her smile an identical echo of Campbell’s.
When she looks up at us it holds, and I can almost convince myself that she’s happy to see me.
In her wedding dress, she looks like heaven.
“This is Mattie.”
Campbell urges me forward with a gentle press of his fingertips. I almost don’t want to go, just so I can hold on to it—the feeling of him moving toward me.
But I do, and Campbell’s dad looks up at me. He smiles as his eyes move over my face. They’re pale blue, so different than Campbell’s. But when he speaks, they sound exactly the same.
“Well, hello there.” The words are sandy and coarse. I glance at Campbell instinctually: Are you hearing this? But he only smiles, a muted tilt of his lips.
Campbell’s dad makes to stand, one hand extending toward me, but Josie quickly reaches for his shoulder.
“Oh, Dad, don’t get up.” She smiles at him, then me. “Save your energy for later.”
“What?” he asks, his gaze hovering over Josie before moving to me and finally landing on Campbell.
“It’s okay,” Josie says, squeezing his shoulder before letting go. Campbell is quiet, his jaw tensed.
“You’re all good,” Josie says, lightly. “We’ve just got a big walk ahead of us.”
Campbell’s dad looks at me, unsure. I reach out a hand so he doesn’t have to come to me.
“Hi,” I say. His hand trembles in the space between us before I take it in both of mine. “It’s so nice to meet you, Mr. Porter.”
“Cam,” Josie corrects me, not unkindly. “That’s what he’d want you to call him.”
Campbell’s dad just smiles. His hand is warm and soft in mine. “Cam,” I say, quietly.
“And I’m Josie,” she says. I lower her dad’s hand into his lap and turn to her, extending my palm. She takes it and squeezes.
“Congratulations,” I say. “And thank you so much for letting me be here.”
Josie smiles, then looks at Campbell behind me. Something inscrutable passes between them, and she’s opening her mouth to speak when someone calls, “Jo? Did you find the earrings?”
“Coming!” she says, and looks at her father. “Be right back, Dad.”
When she steps around me, she lifts a hand to Campbell’s cheek and pats it twice. “Be good, Cammy.”
He rolls his eyes and exhales shortly. Josie glances back at me before disappearing.
“How we doing in here, sir?” A man in matching blue pants and a short-sleeved button-down appears at the other end of the galley kitchen. Plover House is stitched along his breast pocket. “Getting excited?”
The guy smiles at me, then Campbell, before looking back down at Cam.
“Oh, very,” Campbell’s dad says. He chuckles, then pats one of his hands on top of the other. “Very much so.”
“Should we get your tie on?”
“I can do it,” Campbell says. He steps past me, almost touching but not quite, and reaches for his dad’s wheelchair. “Thanks, Evan.”
“Got it,” Evan says, smiling. “I’ll be in the living room if you need me.”
He retreats and Campbell looks at me. “I’m going to help him. You can sit; they have all the chairs set up, now.” He lifts his chin toward the back door. “Second row, I think.”
“Do you—” I hesitate. “Should I sit that close?”
Campbell holds my gaze. Then he says, “I’ll see you out there,” and wheels his dad from the room.
They end up down the aisle together, all three of them. Josie in her flowing, ethereal dress, her dad’s hand clamped in hers. Campbell pushing the wheelchair, smiling the whole time in this gentle, honest way. And his dad: looking up at Josie. He doesn’t take his eyes off her for even a second.