Chapter 16 #2
Rosemary Kilbride was in the front row in a blue dress, next to Adrienne.
She had left the Wayzata house in the fall and lives in Little Falls now in her mother's house, and she comes down four or five times a year and stays two nights in the spare room, and Kristin has never told her, and will never tell her, that she is the reason any of this happened.
Adrienne came.
She came in a good coat and did not say one word about the shed, and she stood in a doorway at the reception with a plastic cup of white wine, watching two hundred pounds of eight-month-old dog get into the food table, and Kristin went over and stood beside her and neither of them said anything for a while.
"He looks well," Adrienne said, finally.
"He does."
"He looks like his father did at about thirty." She drank some of the wine. "Which is a compliment and I want you to take it as one, because I have not been able to say a kind thing about that man in twenty years."
"I'll take it."
Adrienne looked out at the shed with its sixty feet of lights.
"I would like to be at Christmas," she said, which is as close as that woman has ever come to asking for anything in her life.
"Then come to Christmas," Kristin said. "It's a small house and the food's not good."
"I'm aware of both," said Adrienne, and drank her wine, and that is where they started, and it has gone slowly and it has gone.
They wrote the vows themselves, which Kristin had been dreading, and then did not dread at all when it came to it, because by then they had had a year of practice at saying things out loud.
Blake went first.
He stood on a concrete floor in a shed he did not own, in front of forty people who mostly milk cows for a living, and did not have a note in his hand.
"I stopped counting you," he said. "That's the thing I did. Everybody here knows some version of it and that's the true one."
Nobody moved. Brynn, in the second row, was already gone.
"So here's what I've got." He was steady.
"I'm going to count you every day. Not love you — I never stopped doing that and it turned out not to be worth much on its own.
Count you. Put you in the arithmetic. Ask you first, tell you before instead of after, and never once in the rest of my life decide something on your behalf and hand it to you as a present.
" He looked at her. "And I'm going to be a man you can walk up to.
There's no gate, there's no drive, and there's nobody standing between me and anybody who wants to say something to me, ever again. Especially you."
He stopped.
"That's the whole of it," Blake said. "I love you, Kristin, and I have never been so glad about anything in my life as I am that you asked me for the house."
Kristin's was shorter, because she is her father's daughter.
"You know what I did for eleven years," she said. "I didn't make a fuss. I let it go. I was easy to be married to, and I thought that was the same thing as being good at it, and it nearly cost me my whole life and it did cost me my hand."
She held it up. The left one. Two fingers curled short, in front of forty people, in a sleeveless dress in June.
"So here's mine. I'm going to make a fuss." A ripple went through the folding chairs. "Every time. Out loud, at the time, in plain words, and it's going to be inconvenient, and you are going to be married to a woman who says things at ten o'clock at night in a kitchen."
Blake was laughing and crying at once.
"And I'm choosing this," Kristin said, and her voice was completely steady and she was not going to be quiet about a single word of it.
"I want that said in front of everybody here, because a lot of you drove past that house last spring and thought things.
I had a whole life. I built it myself in one year with one and a half hands and I would have been happy in it until I was eighty, and I had somewhere else to go and I didn't take it. "
She got hold of his hand.
"I'm not coming back to you because I need you," she said.
"I'm not on probation and neither are you and there is no trial period in this and I don't want to hear the word working on it in my house.
This is done. I've decided. You're mine, and I'm yours, and I love you, and we are going to be very happy — and I intend to say so out loud approximately every day, since apparently that's the whole trick and it only took us thirteen years to find it. "
And Ray Sundstrom said, "Ya," from the front row, at completely the wrong moment, and the entire shed came apart.
The reception went until one in the morning, in a building with a floor drain in it.
Somebody had brought a speaker. Somebody else had brought a keg and a second keg, and there was a bar set up on the tailgate of Nick Pittman's truck, which he had backed in through the west door for that purpose and which he did not move until Tuesday.
Brynn made a speech and it was terrible.
She got about nine words in — "I have known this woman for sixteen years" — and then stopped, and stood there with a plastic cup in her hand and her chin going, and finally said, "Ah, hell, you all know," and sat down, and it was the best speech Kristin has ever heard in her life.
They danced. Kristin can't, and Blake can, which has been a source of friction since 2016.
At about ten o'clock Kristin went out the west door for some air and found her husband standing in the yard talking to Ray Sundstrom and a man from Watertown about a hydrant that kept freezing, all three of them holding beers, none of them looking at the party.
She stood in the doorway and watched that for a full minute.
Two years ago a man in a fleece had stood in a ballroom at the Minnetonka Club being deferred to by everybody in the room, and she had stood four feet from him being asked how she liked the flowers.
Now he was in a yard in the dark arguing about a frost line.
Nobody in that yard was deferring to him. The man from Watertown told him he was wrong, twice, and he was wrong, and he said so.
Kristin went back in and got another drink and did not say anything about it to anybody, and she has thought about it approximately once a week ever since.
There is a photograph from that afternoon that sits on the shelf in the office at the practice.
It is a bad photograph. Brynn took it on her phone and her thumb is in the corner.
The light is wrong because the west door was open.
In it Kristin is laughing with her head back and her arms around her husband's neck — both arms, the scar right there in the middle of the frame, plain as a fence post — and Blake has her off the ground about four inches, and behind them somebody's dog is on the food table and Rosemary Kilbride is out of focus with both hands over her mouth.
Nick Pittman is on the fence rail at the edge of it with a beer, laughing at the dog.
Adrienne Ellison is in the doorway with a plastic cup, and if you look closely — Kristin has looked closely, many times, and so has Brynn, and they agree — the old woman is smiling.
They went home to the brown house that night at about one in the morning, in the truck, in their wedding clothes, with the windows down.
Kristin drove. She always drives.
The house was dark and the yard light was on and the pup was in the mudroom off the kitchen where they had shut her, and there is a mudroom in that house too — a small one, with a bench and a row of hooks and a linoleum floor with a bad seam in it — and Kristin walks through it six times a day and has never once thought about it, which is a thing she noticed in the fall and did not mention to anybody.
They let the dog out. They stood in the yard while she did what she needed to.
And then Blake said, "Hey," and Kristin said, "What," and he said, "Come here," and she said, "I'm right here," and he said, "Come here," and she went.
He got the zipper of that dress about halfway down in the kitchen and then had to stop and laugh, because there was hay in her hair and she could not get her earrings out one-handed and neither of them had eaten anything since noon.
"Hold still."
"I am holding still."
"You are not." He was working at the second earring with the enormous concentration of a man doing something with his hands that his hands are not for. "How do you get these out by yourself?"
"I don't wear earrings by myself."
"Kris."
"I got them in with my teeth and Brynn," she said, "and I'd like it on the record that this is the least practical thing I have ever done."
He got it out. He put both of them on the counter next to the truck keys and a bill from the feed store, which is where they still are.
"We're too old for this," she said, into his mouth.
"I'm forty-two."
"That's what I said."
He got the dress off her in the doorway of their own bedroom and she got his shirt open and put both hands flat on his chest, and there was no fear anywhere in that room, none, not one grain of it — and she thought, distinctly, with her mouth on his collarbone: that's the difference.
This is the same body. It's the same man.
There's just nothing in the room but us.