Come Rain or Come Shine

  So, okay, speaking was not his primary skill, but somebody had to do it. ‘I’m in.’

  ‘Yay, Doc!’ said Lace.

  ‘Yay, Doc!’ said Jack Tyler, who was digging into Honey Hershell’s creamed corn.

  ‘Game on, dude.’ Sam tapped his knife against a glass.

  The sun went down, the groom stood up. He didn’t want to be bawling in front of people like his dad was so famous for doing. But this was a roller coaster, all this simple country wedding business and Jack Tyler coming; he was knocked out by it, crazy with feelings he was usually able to keep under control. What do you do with that kind of stuff when you stand up in front of people? What if it all came busting out in everybody’s face like Choo-Choo? But come on, he was a husband now, he was a dad, he was a licensed vet—let it roll, he could do this.

  ‘Thanks, everybody, for coming out to be happy with us!’

  Cheers, applause. Cowbell.

  ‘And thanks for all the great cooking. Lace and I couldn’t have done this without you, that’s for sure.

  ‘I’d like to make a few tributes, but I’m going to let you off the hook, so no need to clap till the end unless you can’t help yourself.’

  Laughter. Cowbell. Scattered applause from those who couldn’t help themselves.

  ‘We thank our parents, who have done everything they could to help us get settled, who stood by us even when we were crazy, and were always there for us. Dad, Cynthia, Doc, Olivia . . . call on us anytime. We’re here for you, too.

  ‘Which reminds me, Dad—you’re goin’ to need a truck. When you’re ready, give me a shout, I’m your man.

  ‘Thanks to my brother Sammy, who flew in from a big competition in Minneapolis, where he hammered his three-rail bank shot in the last game and won the championship!’

  Cowbell, applause. ‘Way to go, Sam!’ shouted Doc Owen.

  ‘Thanks to my brother Kenny, who came from Oregon with his wife, Julie, and their two kids. Ethan and Etta have given Jack Tyler a really priceless gift—instant cousins!’

  Cowbell, applause; clearly, people had no desire to help themselves.

  ‘Thanks to my brother and sister, who came all the way from Mitford—thumbs up with th’ dogs, Jess, good job bein’ best man, Pooh. Y’all made a difference.’

  Cowbell, applause. ‘Pooh! Jess! Yo!’

  ‘Thanks to my dad’s brother, Uncle Henry, a railroad man from Mississippi who rode the Crescent up from Birmingham, and to Uncle Walter and Katherine, here from New Jersey.

  ‘Where’s Father Brad? We appreciate you being part of the ceremony and for being such a great influence in our lives. I can hardly wait for the next snow camp mash-up in a high wind, followed by nosebleed and a great meal out of a can.’

  Laughter, applause, cowbell.

  ‘Thanks, Beth, for coming down from New York and singing for us and helping Lace, and thank you, Mary Ellen, for joining us from Boston. We appreciate it.’

  Applause, cowbell.

  He held up the small carving of a bull, the neck tied with raffia. ‘Great job, Clarence. Thanks for the amazingly lifelike images of the big guy who made our wedding unforgettable.’

  Applause. Cowbell.

  ‘Thumbs up to the Ham Biscuits, who are really great musicians and special friends. Thanks, guys, for totaling the tenderloin before we could get to it. And special thanks for saving our gizzards.’

  ‘Gizzards!’ said Jack Tyler.

  Whistles, applause. ‘Go, Biscuits!’ Cowbell.

  ‘To all of you who unloaded your scraps under the table, even though their vet has all four canines strictly on kibble—thanks for ruining my game. And thanks, Danny, for giving me the opportunity to kiss the bride. Think I’ll do it again.’ He leaned down and did it again.

  ‘Go, D-Do-Right!’

  Applause with cowbell.

  ‘That was a crowd-pleaser,’ Doc Owen said to the table.

  ‘Okay,’ said Dooley. ‘This is a big one. Somebody—we don’t know who—made it possible for Kenny and Julie and Ethan and Etta to fly from Oregon. This means a lot to our family, we truly appreciate it. So come on, people, let us know who you are. Maybe you’ll stand.’

  He expected Doc and Olivia to stand, even though they wouldn’t especially like doing it.

  But nobody stood.

  ‘So okay, my thanking is about done.’

  He stooped to Jack Tyler—‘Here we go, buddy’—and picked him up and held him in the crook of his arm and felt the boy’s arm slide around his neck.

  Lace stood with him. Candle flames shimmered along the table.

  ‘Lace and I thank God for giving us our son, Jack Tyler.

  ‘It’s been a long road for him and for us to get where we are tonight, and a few times we thought we wouldn’t make it.

  ‘Dad is one for the quotes; he’ll throw a quote at you in a heartbeat. I don’t have that talent, but when I started vet school, I did find something that worked for me. I actually wrote it on the wall of my apartment. The landlord said he’d seen worse.’

  Laughter.

  ‘I think John Lennon said it. Everything will be okay in the end. And if it isn’t okay, it isn’t the end.

  ‘Tonight everything is better than okay. But it isn’t the end. It’s just the beginning.

  ‘Here’s to a new beginning, everybody. We love you.’

  ‘Dancing on the porch!’ said Lace.

  Cowbell. Applause. Standing ovation. The whole nine yards.

  Doc Owen gave her a kiss on the cheek. ‘He could run for county supervisor and get us a two-lane bridge up the road.’

  Lace laughed. ‘Don’t even think about it. You run for county supervisor and get us a two-lane bridge!’

  She hadn’t known her husband could make a talk that was so natural and fun.

  ‘That was wonderful,’ she said. ‘Perfect.’

  His legs were H2O. He had blanked and couldn’t remember what he said. And who did he leave out? He’d rather neuter a boar hog.

  Vanita pulled the minivan onto the shoulder of the state road and foraged in the camera bag for her notebook and pen. She was almost home, which was south of Mitford and halfway to Holding, but if she didn’t write this stuff down—sayonara.

  She scribbled the headline, she could see it now.

  Local Couple Says I Do,

  Bull Says You Do Not!!!

  She couldn’t stand it another minute—the smell in here was driving her crazy. She retracted her seat belt and picked up the plate from the floor of the passenger side and peeled back the foil and so what if she didn’t have a fork.

  Two and a half cherry pies and two OMCs, down the hatch.

  Cynthia had gone to the house; he could hear the musicians tuning up on the porch. He scraped the minute remains off the two cake plates into a Ziploc.

  He could not have a slice, but he could sure have crumbs. He zipped the baggie and folded it and put it in his jacket pocket.

  ‘Rose Watson lives!’ he said to Lily, though she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

  ‘How would you like to have some fun?’

  She didn’t know how to process this remark; it sounded like a pickup line that nobody used anymore.

  ‘I know this song,’ Tommy said. He was holding the sheet music Doc Harper wanted him to play tonight. ‘If you’ll sing it with me, we could step in the front room and do a quick run-through. Nobody’s in there and we have a few minutes.’

  A song she’d never heard in her life? With only a quick run-through? Just out there?

  ‘I’ve never heard this song.’

  ‘But would you sing it with me?’

  She was going to say no, but when she opened her mouth she said, ‘Yes.’

  She found Dooley in the living room, waiting for Lace to come down for the first dance.
Regret wasn’t enough, it would never be enough.

  He made eye contact with her and she was grateful.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘For everything.’

  She tried to remember him when he was little, but she could not.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. He waited, looking down, and then up again. ‘It’s okay.’

  She understood that this was all he had to say. He said it was okay, not in the same way Pooh meant it, but in a good way.

  He watched her turn and walk out to the porch and wanted to go after her and give her something more, but he couldn’t. As a child, he had loved her desperately, no matter what, the way God loved him, no matter what. He was glad she said something from a place beneath the surface; he had felt the current of it.

  It was like on TV, the way the mom looked in the shining dress and the music in the yard started playing really loud and the Tommy person was singing and people were clapping and the dad walked across the porch to the mom and then they were dancing really slow.

  I set out on a narrow way many years ago

  Hopin’ I would find true love along the broken road . . .

  The lady whose husband died and went up to heaven said that when people die everything in heaven is perfect. Everybody is happy. Maybe this was heaven, but he hoped he had not died, but if he had, he didn’t know when it happened. Maybe when he ate a piece of cake tonight that made the stars go off behind his eyes and somebody said it was to die for. He felt all over himself and he was still here and not dead and his ring was here that said forever.

  He wanted to be with them and not the grannies, so he ran over to where they were dancing and looked up and the dad stopped and laughed and picked him up and they all three danced together wearing rings that said something special inside and the people watching clapped again.

  When they twirled around like on TV, the lights ended up being a big circle shining. And all the people watching ran together in a circle, too. He was as tall as Big Bird.

  This guy in a collar, dancing with a Boston woman, was someone he didn’t know. No, wait. It was someone he knew, but from a very long time ago.

  Now the band was playing a number he’d heard Randy Travis sing. He liked Randy, who was somebody who had scrambled up mountains and fallen off more than a few.

  They say time can play tricks on a memory

  Make people forget things they knew . . .

  Where to take it from here? When you’re doing a big hike, you make rest stops. He had talked way too much, it was time to be quiet and listen to the words . . .

  Crazy thought. That means he’d have to go home tonight and clean out his Jeep and wash it in the moonlight and remember to vacuum the seats coated with Daisy’s dog hair and take the gum out of the ashtray. But tomorrow was Monday, alleluia; he could do this.

  ‘So how about if I pick you and Beth up in the morning, we get your car back to the rental place, and I drive you to the airport?’ This was going way out on a limb—a place he’d always enjoyed going, actually.

  He held her closer, but only a little closer. He was clergy, after all, on view to the world twenty-four/seven.

  She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no. She said, ‘Aioli.’

  He laughed. They both laughed. He wanted to kiss this woman. Just once. Once! Surely that wasn’t too much to ask—after all, she would be leaving in the morning.

  When he picked her up at the hotel, he would bring her a bloom from his Gardenia jasminoides.

  ‘Look,’ she said to Dooley.

  Hoppy and Olivia dancing. She thought they were beautiful, the way they fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

  And there was Jack Tyler dancing with Etta and Cynthia and Father Tim, and in the yard, Buck and Pauline dancing, and Katherine in her super-great jeans and really expensive pearls dancing with her husband of forty-nine years, and Henry smiling his lovely smile at Rebecca Jane, who had caught the bouquet even though she was joining a nunnery if she didn’t get accepted at UNC.

  And there was Harley sitting with Miss Pringle on a bench beneath maples lit by fireflies.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ said Dooley.

  ‘Maybe we don’t need to understand it,’ she said.

  Sammy and Kenny and Pooh and a few others were shooting pool, so she and Dooley danced with Julie and Jessie, and then Henry danced with Cynthia, very stately and sweet, and Rebecca Jane hauled Danny off the porch and made him dance with her.

  ‘I don’t want t’ dance!’ said Danny.

  ‘Dance!’ said Rebecca Jane. ‘It’s what you do at weddings! Show some manners, for gosh sake!’

  Rebecca Jane Owen had tormented him all his life. One time when he was seven and she was twelve, he took the rungs off the ladder to her tree house and hid them in the woods. She was totally overdue . . .

  ‘Look,’ said Dooley.

  Tommy had stepped away from the band and was dancing with Beth.

  ‘Why can’t life always be lived under the stars,’ she said, ‘with great music and family and friends?’ A purely rhetorical question, but she had to wonder.

  Cynthia sat with Etta on the glider while Julie went up to Heaven to put Ethan to bed. Given the innumerable books she had written and illustrated for children, she should have discovered a better opening line, but so far she had not.

  ‘How old are you, Etta?’

  ‘Foah.’

  ‘You’re the same age as Jack Tyler!’

  ‘I know thith.’

  ‘Did you see the cows?’

  ‘Yeth.’ Etta stretched her arms wide. ‘Thith big.’

  ‘And the chickens?’

  ‘I could take one home in my duffel. I could take out my thingths and put in a chicken. He could thleep with me in my bed.’

  ‘Do you have a dog?’

  ‘Woolly. He thleeps in my bed.’

  ‘Do you think Woolly and your chicken would get along?’

  ‘If they do not get along, I would thend the chicken back.’

  ‘I love your curly hair.’

  Etta nodded. She had heard this before.

  ‘And your dress is a dream. Very sweet with the polka dots.’

  ‘My dreth is new.’

  ‘Mine is old.’

  ‘I have two old drethes.’

  ‘Just two? I have a closetful. Well, Etta, you certainly know how to dance.’

  ‘I wiggle mythelf all ovah.’

  Cynthia laughed. ‘That works!’

  Nine o’clock and Tommy and the Biscuits had never sounded better; everybody was having a blast.

  They had bedded their exhausted pup in a crate in Jack Tyler’s room, taken off the boy’s boots and helped him change into pajamas, no bath tonight. They were all wired from the dancing and the laughter and the OMC and the cherry pie. Now to wind down a four-year-old with the full moon as a major night-light.

  ‘Did you brush your teeth?’ she said. ‘Over and over?’

  ‘Not over an’ over.’

  ‘You need to do it over and over, there are germs in there.’ How could she say these things that she had never been told as a child? She just opened her mouth and out came information that she supposed mothers were born to say. She would have to get more books—a lot of books.

  ‘Does germs have teeth?’

  ‘They do. I think they do. They can eat up your gums.’ Really—how could she ever . . . ?

  ‘Does cows have teeth?’

  ‘They do,’ said Dooley.

  ‘Does they bite?’

  ‘Not often. But they can. You’ll get to know the heifers, and before long, we’ll be feeding them grain together. Right out of our hands.’

  ‘Can cows git in th’ house?’

  ‘Probably not. They sleep in the pasture inside a fence. They wouldn’t like being in
the house.’

  ‘Can they climb up stairs?’

  ‘Definitely not. If they could, our pup would bark and scare ’em right out the window. But they’re not going to get in the house. Unless you let them in.’

  Jack Tyler laughed his quick, squealing laugh and squeezed Roo to his chest. ‘I’m not lettin’ no cows in th’ house.’

  ‘Good,’ said Dooley. ‘Glad that’s settled.’

  ‘I don’t want to sleep by myself.’

  ‘Aunt Julie will come and check on you,’ said Lace. ‘Cousin Etta and Cousin Ethan are right up the stairs from you. Your dad and I will check on you, and our puppy is here with you and Roo is with you and we won’t go downstairs till you fall asleep.’

  ‘Doesn’t get any better than that,’ said Dooley. ‘How did you like being in the wedding? You did a great job. Was it fun?’

  ‘Yeah. I like my pants.’

  ‘We like your pants, too. How about that ring, dude? What does yours say inside? Remember?’

  ‘Forever!’

  ‘Don’t take it off, leave it on when you wash your hands,’ she said. ‘As you get bigger, we’ll have it expanded so it grows with you.’

  ‘Did you like dancing with Etta?’

  ‘She talks funny.’

  ‘We all talk funny,’ said Dooley.

  Jack Tyler flopped back on the pillow and closed his eyes. They thought he might be settling down. But no. He sat up. ‘I have a great idea!’

  ‘Shoot,’ said Dooley.

  ‘We could make another wedding tomorrow!’

  She loved seeing her husband laugh till his face turned red.

  The laughter gave them all a second wind. Jack Tyler held up his unstuffed toy and jiggled it. ‘Roo, Roo, Roo! You carried Roo!’

  ‘I liked carrying Roo,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you love him, I love him, too.’

  ‘You can carry him again.’

  ‘Thanks. Now lie down. And tomorrow we’ll talk about giving our puppy a name,’

  ‘She’s already got a name,’ said Jack Tyler. ‘Her name is Charley.’

  ‘Remember the puppy’s a female,’ said Dooley. ‘How about if we give her a girl’s name?’