Chapter 18 #2
They wrote the vows themselves, which Tess had resisted for three weeks on the grounds that it was mortifying, and then done anyway.
Porter went first.
"I said I'd never make a speech about this again," he said, "and I'm not going to. So this is the short one.
"I know exactly what I did. It's mine, it's permanent, and I'm not going to spend our life apologizing for it, because you told me not to and because you were right — a man paying off a debt is not a husband, he's a tenant.
" There was a laugh from somewhere near the back. "So here's what I've got instead.
"You will never again have to wonder where I am.
You will never again be somebody's second call.
If you ring me from a mountain at one in the morning, I will pick it up on the first ring, and if I am ever unreachable it will be because I am dead.
" He waited for the noise to settle. "Nobody stands between me and you.
Not a person, not an office, not my family, not a phone. Not for the rest of my life.
"And I love you. I've loved you for twelve years and I was extremely bad at it for most of them and I have got the rest of it to be good at it, and I intend to be. That's the whole speech."
Tess had planned something longer and threw about half of it away standing there.
"I'm going to say the true thing," she said, "because we've got a rule about that now.
"I did not come back to you because I ran out of road.
I want everybody standing in this meadow to hear that, because it's my land and it's my outfit and I could have done the whole of it alone and been all right.
" She looked at him. "I'm choosing you. I chose you on a Tuesday in August thirteen months ago at a kitchen table, and I have chosen you every day since, and I'm going to keep on doing it — and it is not a trial and it is not a probation and I am not watching you.
"You are not on parole in this marriage. You're my husband.
"And I'm not disappearing again. You're going to hear about the thermostat and the stools and every single thing I want for the rest of your life, and you have no idea what you've signed up for.
" She had to stop for a second. "I love you.
I never actually stopped, which was the most annoying part of the entire year.
"That's mine."
Toni, officiating under a one-day license from the State of Colorado, said, "Well, thank God that's over," and married them.
He kissed her in front of forty people for considerably longer than was decent, and Tate whooped, and the girl from Meeker's father put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, and somewhere near the back Osgood from Pueblo cried openly and without any embarrassment at all.
Toni gave a toast at nine with a beer in her hand.
"I've known this woman for twenty-one years," she said. "I have pulled her off a mountain, I have been pulled off a mountain by her, and I hated her husband so much last winter that I used to think about it in the shower to get my blood going."
"Toni—"
"I'm not finished." She turned to Porter. "You are the worst hand I have ever employed. You cannot throw a hitch. In two seasons you have cost me more in rope than you have earned."
"That's true," Porter said.
"And you stood in a creek for forty minutes.
" Toni's voice did something on the last word and she stopped and started again.
"You stood in a creek for forty minutes and never looked over to see if she was watching, and I have been trying to get around that for two years and I can't, so I'm going to stop.
" She raised the bottle. "To the good part.
It took long enough. Everybody eat something, the beans are going cold. "
They ate something. The beans were already cold.
There was dancing, badly, on flattened grass, and somebody's boy fell in the ditch, and at half past ten Tess stood in the middle of her own meadow with her husband's hand on the back of her neck and forty people making noise around her, and she thought, with total clarity and no complication whatsoever: this is the happiest I have ever been in my life.
Later — much later, past midnight, with the fire down and most people gone and somebody's speaker playing something terrible from the tailgate of a truck — Tess sat on the top rail of the corral in a green dress and her boots with her husband standing between her knees.
"I have to tell you something," she said.
"Now?"
"It's not bad. Camille Fenwick told me a thing at the fire and I have been holding it for four hours."
"Go on."
"Marin Keane's running a Senate campaign in Nevada and she's very good at it."
Porter thought about that.
"Good," he said. "Genuinely. That's the correct use of her."
"That's what I said."
"Is that the whole thing?"
"That's the whole thing." Tess put her arms around his neck. "That's the last time that name comes up in my life, I've decided. It took nine months of my life and it gets about nine seconds tonight."
"Suits me."
She kissed him. He tasted like cake and somebody's whiskey.
"Hey," she said, against his mouth. "Say the thing."
"Which thing?"
"You know which thing."
He put his hands on her waist and leaned back to look at her — a sunburned man in a good suit with a wrecked left hand and a wife on a fence rail, in a meadow, in August, with the whole valley black and the fire going orange behind him.
"First ring," Porter said. "Every time. For the rest of my life."
"For the rest of your life."
"Say yours."
Tess Thayer looked at her husband and did not hedge one word of it.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said. "Not ever. This is the marriage now — this one, the good one, the one we've got — and I'm in it all the way to the end, and I'm going to be very happy, and so are you, and that's decided."
"That's decided," he agreed.
"Now come here."
He came there.
And behind them Toni yelled something rude across the yard about getting a room, and Tate whooped, and somebody put a better song on, and Tess Thayer laughed against her husband's mouth in her own meadow, on her own ground, with her name and his on the deed and forty people she loved making a racket in the dark — and stayed exactly where she was, holding on to him, for a long, long time.