Chapter 12 – June Wedding

He took off his hat and held it in both hands, the way he held it when something mattered. “Clara Bennett, will you give me the chance to be worth staying for?”

She looked at him with the eyes that had been seeing him clearly since October. “Yes,” she said simply, the way she said everything that mattered.

They were married in June in the Millfield church on a Saturday morning with the Wyoming summer outside: the hills green and brilliant, the mountains clear, the sky the enormous blue that Wyoming produces in June. The whole of Millfield was there, which surprised no one. Pete from the general store had been telling people since November that this was going to happen, and was gratified to have been right. The schoolteacher who had Annie’s books sat in the third row and cried quietly and beautifully from the second hymn onward. The reverend performed the ceremony with the expression of a man who has been watching something good develop for eight months and is glad it has arrived at the correct conclusion.

Thomas stood at the altar and watched Clara come down the aisle. She was carrying wildflowers: a small mixed bouquet, lavender and asters, and the early yellow flowers from the South Creek—the same ones she had been putting in Thomas’s Friday bouquets since October. She had made it herself that morning.

He thought about Annie. He thought about the fact that he could stand at this altar, think about Annie, and feel love rather than only grief—that the love was still there, and the grief had made room, the way grief does eventually if you tend it carefully and don’t try to rush it. He thought that Annie would have had opinions about the ceremony, strong ones, probably something about the flowers.

Clara reached the altar. She looked at him; he looked at her.

After the ceremony, outside on the church steps, Pete appeared at Thomas’s elbow. “Took you long enough,” Pete said.

“Eight months,” Thomas said.

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Pete nodded as if eight months were self-evidently excessive. “I saw it in October,” Pete said, “when you started pausing at the door.”

Thomas looked at him. “Everybody saw it in October.”