Mary and O’Neil

GROOM

May 1991

THE MORNING HE IS to be married, O’Neil Burke-thirty, orphaned, a teacher of ninth- and eleventh-grade English-awakens first at 3:00 A.M. to laughter and the bright crash of glass on pavement, again at 5:00 when the sun is rising, and once more at 8:00, when he lifts his head from the pillow, moist with the sweat of his hangover and uneasy dreams, and looks out the window by his bed in the old hotel. Two floors below he can see the parking lot, his friends’ cars, the sweeping lawn, splendidly green; beyond that the stand of hemlock and white pine ascending the steep hill. By his own car someone has dropped a beer bottle, and he remembers the sound of it breaking, and his friend Connor’s voice, cheerfully drunk, barking, “God-damn!” The air is still and moist, the sun warm for a morning in late May this far north, and the windows of the cars are glazed with Vermont ’s heavy dew. O’Neil hears the slap of a screen door, and while he watches, a woman exits the rear of the hotel and crosses the lot to her car, a new sedan that is probably rented. It is Simone, one of Mary’s friends from high school; O’Neil hadn’t met her until the night before, at the party in the hotel bar. She has already dressed for the wedding, in high sling-back heels, a pale green dress open at the shoulders, and a wide straw hat with a silk flower and red ribbon, forked at the back and trailing in the swing of her rich blond hair. The hat, O’Neil thinks, looks good on her, though it wouldn’t look as good on most women, and because she is wearing high heels, her trip across the uneven pavement of the lot takes some time, as if she knows someone is watching. When she reaches the car she keys the trunk and removes a large white package done up with a bow, the same red as the ribbon of her hat. Holding the package, she lifts her face and sees O’Neil watching her from his second-story window, and waves. Or, perhaps it isn’t O’Neil she has seen, just a shape through the screen. Embarrassed, O’Neil returns the wave.

His mind does not dwell on this, but turns to the weather, on which everything depends. While he has watched Simone cross the lot, the clouds seem to have thickened, congealing overhead in a portentous way. The wedding is scheduled for noon, in the meadow high above his sister’s house, five miles away. The meadow is reachable only by a narrow path; if it rains, even a quick shower, the path may become too muddy for their guests, or worse, it may wash out. In any event, the meadow will be soaked. O’Neil begins to worry, and so he rises, hurriedly washes his face and brushes his teeth, and puts on running clothes to go up the hill behind the hotel to have a look. It was clear, he remembers, when he first woke up, but now he doesn’t know what it’s going to do.

O’Neil is sitting on the bed, pulling up his socks, when there is a sharp knock on the door and Stephen, the best man, pokes his head into the room. His hair is wet, and his cheeks are smooth from shaving; he looks remarkably alert, O’Neil thinks, for someone who drank nearly all night, especially the sour, heavy beer made in the hotel’s microbrewery. It was good beer, O’Neil remembers, but not the sort of thing to drink too much of.

“I can’t believe it,” Stephen says. He sits down heavily on the empty bed next to O’Neil’s. “You’re going running? Go back to bed.”

“Is that what you’re wearing for the wedding?” Stephen is dressed in jeans, old sandals held together with electrician’s tape, and a T-shirt that reads “I Am a Womanmade Product.” O’Neil frowns, remembering Simone, her slow progress across the parking lot, like a model on a runway.

“Relax, will you? This thing is hours away. Have a beer. You want a beer?”

“I’m running up the hill.” O’Neil has begun to lace his shoes, one-hundred-dollar Nikes with molded orthotic inserts to balance his wobbly knees. Climbing a steep hill seems a good way to begin the day of his marriage, a suitable purification, but as he leans over to tie the laces a watery dizziness fills his head and the energy that launched him from bed departs, leaving him exhausted and frightened. He has to take a deep breath, then another. Then the feeling passes; he is fine.

“I don’t know about this weather,” he manages. “What’s it doing out?”

“Little of this, little of that.” Stephen fishes in the pocket of his jeans for a cigarette, which he lights and leaves in the corner of his mouth, his right eye squinting artfully above the trail of smoke. “I hate to tell you, but Mary warned me you might try to bolt”-he gestures broadly at O’Neil, now dressed to run-“and you’re not going anywhere.”

“So come with me. It’s not far. How late were you up, anyway? I heard you for a while out there.”

“Don’t know.” Stephen shrugs. “Two or so. Connor’s still asleep.” He looks at the end of his cigarette and frowns acidly. “You know, this really tastes bad.” He crosses the room to find an ashtray and crushes it out. “All right,” he agrees. “I’ll meet you out front. This should be a lot of laughs for you. I can’t run at all.”

Outside, O’Neil sees he was right about the weather. The breeze has picked up, and heavy clouds have gathered from the west and south, over the hill that stands behind the inn. At his car he kicks aside the broken glass, steps back, and places one foot on the bumper to stretch out the calf. His lower back is tight, but the leg stretches out fine, and he holds the position for ten seconds, feeling the muscle grow warm and pliable before he changes to the other leg. He does his hams, his quads, each exercise bringing him closer to the moment when he will feel that he has moved into his body, and his day can begin. He is sitting on the grass, his knees apart and the soles of his shoes perfectly aligned, when the screen door slaps and Stephen trots into the yard. He has changed to jogging clothes: cutoff shorts and a fresh T-shirt, sleeveless this time, with the emblem of a cruise line printed across the front. On his feet he wears black high-tops with plastic orange basketballs embedded in the tongues. The leather actually looks buttery, O’Neil thinks.

“Don’t you have any other sneakers?” O’Neil nods glumly at Stephen’s feet. “Those will give you shin splints, believe me.”

Stephen has begun, mockingly, to do jumping jacks, slapping his hands in the air over his head and counting numbers at random: “Six, fourteen, a hundred and eight.” Then he drops to the ground and does five snappy push-ups, wheezes hard, and collapses on the moist grass. “You know,” he moans, “the problem is I love to smoke. I mean, I truly love it. It would break my heart to quit.”

It is nine when they set off together down the drive, O’Neil holding back a little to let Stephen set the pace. O’Neil doesn’t quite know where he’s going, but he thinks there must be a way up the hill, something with an obvious name: Top of the World Road or Bella Vista Lane. From there he should be able to get a good look at what’s headed in their direction. The wedding is three hours away, and though a tent has been erected in his sister’s yard as a backup, it is important to both O’Neil and Mary to be married outside. They came up with the idea months ago, when there was still an inch of gray snow in Philadelphia and spring seemed a long way off. On the invitations, they wrote no address, only “The Meadow, Hanford, Vermont,” and shaded the paper with pastels: a stroke of green for the earth, blue and pink and bits of brown to hold the sky above it. It was a fun night, coloring the invitations at the dining room table of their small apartment, and O’Neil and Mary finished a bottle of wine while they worked, as they had done when they were first together and nervous with one another. But this was different. They were making wedding invitations.

O’Neil and Stephen run for a while in silence, under heavy trees that obstruct their view of the sky and the weather it contains. They are circling the hill, O’Neil knows, skirting its base, but there doesn’t seem to be any way up. Beside him, Stephen breathes heavily, and once in a while O’Neil pulls back to let his friend catch up. Stephen is holding his arms too high-as if he were carrying a pile of wood, when they should be closer to his waist to open the chest-and he is running on his toes, which scuff noisily when he lands. This will hasten the shin splints his heavy sneakers have already guaranteed, but O’Neil decides not to say anything. After about a mile they pass a big house with a barn and two speckled horses grazing on the front lawn; a dirt road veers to the right, along the edge of the property. A bent sign at the roadside reads, Skyline Drive, and beneath that, a warning: Minimum Maintenance Road. Someone has shot three holes in the sign, their edges haloed with rust. Beyond, the road turns again to the right and ascends into the trees.

“No way,” Stephen says. He stops and bends at the waist to brace himself on his knees. For a second O’Neil thinks his friend is about to throw up. Stephen gives his head a horsy shake and spits hard onto the gravel.

“Just don’t think about the hill.” O’Neil’s legs feel thick and sore, and he knows that if he stops moving his courage will leave him.

“It’s these shoes,” Stephen says. “I can’t believe you let me wear these fucking shoes.” He spits again and collapses on the ground, bracing his back against the thin signpost. He waves O’Neil on, his eyes already closed. “Here is where my job ends,” he says.

O’Neil doesn’t respond, and starts up the hill alone. He guesses it’s a mile at most to the top, but he runs easily in case the distance has deceived him. It surprises him, how bad he feels. Though he has slept only six hours and that not well, he hasn’t run for three days, and usually his body stores the energy. Today he feels as if he’s never run at all; his side aches, his fingers tingle with a strange coldness, and he cannot find the correct rhythm-legs, arms, lungs, the body’s musical sentence in three-quarter time-to match the hill that rises under him, carrying him up into the woods. The road is sloppy from late spring runoff, and O’Neil hears the soft gurgle of a nearby creek, winding its mossy way down the hillside. He passes a small house, then a second, larger one, with a gracious wraparound porch and a hammock slung in the yard, and he wonders how it would be to live up here as his sister does, to raise a family in this country of tall trees and long winters; for a moment he imagines that such a life is what he would like to have someday, believing it but also hoping that turning the idea around in his head will carve a space his jangling body can slide into. When it doesn’t, he thinks about Mary, who is awake by now and dressing for the wedding in her room with her friends, and about the children they may someday have, the kind of work they will do, and the houses they will live in. He thinks about a book he read years ago-a book he loved and had forgotten-about a boy who lives alone in the forests of Maine and befriends the trees and animals. He thinks about his sister, who will stand with him at the altar, her husband and sons; he remembers his parents, how he misses them on this, his wedding day.

O’Neil has climbed for ten minutes when the road levels and gives onto a grassy clearing with a view to the north and behind him, higher up, a field in which a herd of sheep dreamily graze. O’Neil stops and stands with his back to the field, resting his hand on a smoothly weathered fence post. Below him he can see his hotel and the town of Southwich, its grid of streets and houses and shops, and his heart expands at the sight of this happy and attractive place that exists for no reason. To the west he finds the main road where it follows the lake, a shimmering expanse two miles away, and beyond it the great sullen peaks of the Adirondacks, now socked in heavy haze. Again O’Neil looks east, toward his sister’s house, and counts seven lines of clouds drifting almost imperceptibly toward him in the lazy air. Far off, a curtain of rain falls into the hills.

It is here, alone with the town laid out below him, that O’Neil allows himself to think about his parents and remember the accident that killed them twelve years ago. This is why he has come. He does not believe in heaven, or the existence of consciousness after death, but he knows that his awareness of them is never far, like a ghost that travels beside him, always at the edge of his vision; and that when he wishes to feel close to them, as he does today, he can bring this awareness into focus, briefly, in a picture. He closes his eyes and lets his mind range. The image he selects is from his sister’s wedding, a year before the accident: his father in his tuxedo, standing on a chair to toast the gathering; his mother laughing, her head thrown back in release, her face opening with pleasure at the wit of the toast O’Neil can no longer hear. There is my father, he thinks, my father, toasting. There is my mother in her blue dress. He holds the picture in his mind as long as he can, until the colors blend and shift, the signal breaks up like a radio station gone out of range, and what remains is only a spidery light that dances against the interior of his closed eyes and the memory that they are dead. Then he says a prayer against the rain and heads down the hill.

Stephen is asleep at the bottom, and together they walk back to the hotel. By the time they return it is after ten. Mary’s parents are finishing breakfast in the dining room, and before O’Neil can hurry up the stairs they see him and wave him over. They are dressed for the wedding, and O’Neil, in his damp T-shirt and shorts, stands awkwardly by their table and eats a cinnamon roll while they talk about the weather. If it looks like rain, Gretchen wants to know, will they still hike up to the meadow? She hopes he’ll say no-Mary’s family has been a little uncomfortable with the plan all along-but he says he’s not sure; he’ll have to talk to Mary. Probably, he says, if it looks like rain but isn’t actually raining, they will go ahead with it.

O’Neil finishes his roll, takes another off the table to eat later in his room, and excuses himself to meet his friends and dress. He has nearly crossed the lobby when the manager stops him and hands him the phone: his sister.

“What about the weather?” she asks.

O’Neil rubs his eyes. He is exhausted by the question, and doesn’t want to make any more decisions. Guests are beginning to come downstairs. He really needs to go get ready. He tells his sister he doesn’t know.

“Well, it’s raining over here. It was raining, anyway. I don’t see how the old folks are going to make it up the path.” There is a scratching noise on the line, and O’Neil’s sister’s voice drifts away. “Stop it, Noah. Here, play with this.” Then she returns. “O’Neil? Sorry, he’s fussing. The caterer is here too. I think she wants to talk to you about the chairs. If it’s raining we’ll need to put some under the tent.”

“That’s all right.” O’Neil thinks for a minute. What is it he needs? He looks up to see their friends, Russell and Laurie and their young son, Adam, coming down the stairs, the three of them wearing rubber boots and Russell swinging a folded umbrella like a putter. They laugh when they see him still in his running shorts with his wedding an hour away, as if this is typical in some way, which O’Neil knows is certainly true. He is late for almost everything: the last one dressed, the last car in the drive, the last to turn in his grades; except for Stephen, he is the last to marry. “Listen, Kay,” he says.

“Jack, can you do something with him, please?” There is a shuffle as Kay hands his youngest nephew off. “What’s that, hon?”

“I’m stumped. I can’t think anymore. I’m not even dressed.” O’Neil knows she understands what he is really asking; just to let things slide until he gets there, and if there’s anything left to decide, he’ll do it then, or let the momentum of the day force the last pieces into place. “I think I need some ad hoc parenting here,” O’Neil says.

“Steady, kid,” Kay says. Several moments pass. More guests are coming down the stairs, waving to him and shaking their heads at his dishevelment, and O’Neil wants to leave the lobby very badly.

“Okay, how about this,” Kay says at last. “No comment on the weather, the caterer can do whatever she wants with the chairs, and anybody who wants to mess with the groom has to go through me. All right?”

Relief washes over him. “I love you. I mean, you’re my only living relative, but even so.”

“Ditto. Don’t go bugging Mary. I know that’s what you want to do, but that bad-luck stuff is nothing to fool with. Jack didn’t see me, and so far so good.”

O’Neil hangs up, asks the hotel manager please not to give him any more calls, and heads to the kitchen to see if he can scare up a tray of tea and rolls for Mary. His plan is to place it beside her door, knock, and quickly retreat. He believes he has forgotten something, some detail like the caterer’s chairs, but he cannot recall what it might be, and he is just as glad to bring Mary some breakfast and let things take care of themselves. The kitchen is empty, but O’Neil looks around and finds Alice, the woman who tended bar the night before, reading the newspaper in the crowded pantry. Breakfast is over, she says, but she is sure she can put something together.

“So, are you nervous?” she asks, pouring Mary’s tea. She has a pleasant face, with the soft, butterscotchy tan of someone who spends a great deal of time outdoors in all weather. Her blond hair is tied in a thick Teutonic braid that falls the length of her back, the end just touching the top of her jeans. “You don’t look nervous.” She laughs, showing the lines of her eyes. It is a laugh that says that she, too, is married, that it happens to everyone.

“I don’t know,” O’Neil says. “I think maybe I’m just getting used to it.”

“Well, don’t be.” She hands him the tray. On it she has placed, beside the basket of muffins and the mug of tea, a thin glass vase holding a single yellow rose. She wipes her hands on her apron. “Take my word for it. It’s the happiest day of your life. You’ll see.”

“Is it?” O’Neil, holding the tray against his stomach and looking at the rose, feels a tightness in his cheeks and suddenly knows he is about to fall apart. He cannot account for this, because as far as he knows he isn’t nervous, or sad, or even especially happy, though what he feels seems related to happiness. It is as if he is suddenly inside his own emotions, so far inside them that he may have neglected to breathe, and he rests the tray on the counter and inhales deeply through his nose. He notices Alice has left the room. Then she returns, dragging a wooden chair from the pantry.

“Here,” she says, and slides the chair under him. “You rest a minute.”

O’Neil does as she says, and Alice hands him Mary’s tea. He takes a small sip, letting the cup hang under his face to feel the sweet steam on his cheeks. The cup is like a warm, smooth stone in his hand, and he realizes he is shivering.

“The same thing happened to my husband. It’s all right. You can stay in here as long as you need. Your family is probably driving you crazy.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have gone running,” O’Neil says. “I hardly slept at all.”

“You’re just tired.” Alice is crouched on her heels in front of O’Neil, looking into his face. Behind O’Neil the kitchen door swings open and without averting her glance Alice says, “Just a minute in here,” and the door swings closed again. “When’s the ceremony? Noon?” O’Neil nods. “Well, then, in a couple of hours it will all be over, and the two of you will be together. That’s the nicest part, I think.”

“This is the day you always remember,” O’Neil says, inexplicably.

Alice smiles and takes his free hand. Hers, like the cup, is smooth and warm, and covered with flour dust. “That’s right,” she says.

“My parents aren’t here,” O’Neil explains. “They died a long time ago. Maybe that’s what’s bothering me.”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Alice says. “That’s very hard, at a time like this. You must be missing them.”

“I have my sister, though,” O’Neil says. “She was in the bar last night, with her husband. We’re getting married at her house.”

“Well, that’s something. That’s a lot.”

“And Mary, of course. I have her.”

“So that’s your family,” Alice says. She gives O’Neil’s hand an encouraging shake. “Sounds like a nice one. That’s all a family is, in my experience, is people who look after you.”

For a while they stay like this, their hands knitted together, O’Neil drinking the tea. His shivering has stopped, and what he feels now is a languorous contentment that rises from his feet to his legs and chest and arms, and he knows that he could just as easily go to sleep as do anything at all. He would like to go to sleep with Alice watching him, there in the warm kitchen where she works.

“I truly appreciate this,” O’Neil says. “I’m in your debt.”

“It’s nothing.” Alice shrugs, the long rope of her hair swinging. “De nada.”

O’Neil rises and takes the tray. He has finished the tea, but the muffins are still there in a wicker basket covered with a blue napkin. The clock above the stove says that it is just past eleven, and guests will be arriving at the house now. Probably Mary is already there. He puts his hand over the napkin, feeling the radiant moistness of the muffins rising through the cloth, and then Alice lifts her face to him and kisses his cheek. It is the nicest thing he has ever felt in his life, and he instantly wants to tell Mary all about it.

“For the groom,” she says.

Upstairs, his friends are waiting for him: Stephen, wearing his blue suit, and Connor, dressed improbably in seersucker and a pink bow tie. It is a surprising scene; both men, lying on the twin beds of O’Neil’s room, are fast asleep, their hands folded at their waists like pharaohs. The room is dark behind closed shades.

Stephen’s eyes open when O’Neil sits beside him on the bed. He nods hopefully at the tray on O’Neil’s lap. “Breakfast?”

O’Neil hands him the basket of muffins. “Did Mary leave yet?”

Stephen bites into a muffin and nods. “A few minutes ago. I saw them from the window.” He reaches across the space between the beds and lightly slaps Connor’s shoulder. “All hands on deck. Our boy is here.”

“What time is it?” Connor is instantly awake. He has driven up alone from Boston because his wife, an intern at the same hospital where he is a surgical resident, couldn’t get time off from work. “There you are,” he says to O’Neil. “So?”

“I don’t know,” O’Neil says. “It’s late.”

“That’s the beauty of it.” Connor brushes a hand over his coarse hair and grins. His hangover, O’Neil knows, is probably terrible. “No groom, no wedding.”

O’Neil takes a beer from the cooler and heads to the bathroom to shower. The pressure is wonderfully strong, and he takes his time, letting the hot needles run over him, thinking only of the weather, how he hopes it won’t rain, and of his good, loyal friends in the next room. He has known them since high school, seventeen years; soon he will know them longer than he knew his own parents. When he is done he wraps himself with a rough towel and stands in front of the mirror and drinks the beer, which tastes good to him as it always does after a run. He fills the basin to shave, but when he takes the razor in his hand he sees that he is shaking; not shivering, as before, but his hand won’t be still. He finishes the beer and opens the door. Stephen is standing at the window now, smoking a cigarette, and Connor is sitting in the room’s one upholstered chair. For an instant they seem not to notice him. Then Stephen turns and smiles.

“How’s it going in there, tiger?”

“Not so good.” O’Neil holds out his quavering hand to demonstrate. “You were right. I don’t think I can shave.”

“Ah.” Stephen nods. “Connor? This is your department, am I right?”

Connor moves swiftly to the ice chest and removes another Ballantine, wiping the glass on a towel. He hands it to O’Neil. “As your doctor, I advise you to drink this. Now, then-” Connor pulls the desk chair into the bathroom and O’Neil sits, sipping his second beer, which he knows he shouldn’t have. Connor spreads the cream on O’Neil’s cheeks, then moves behind him and gently takes O’Neil’s chin in his hands. His face close to O’Neil’s, he begins to shave him, his eyes following the path of the razor.

“Are you sure you know how to do this?”

“No.”

O’Neil closes his eyes and lets himself feel the scrape of the blade over his chin, where he usually cuts himself. In his ear, Connor’s breathing is a thin whistle, and smells a little of beer. O’Neil can’t believe how late he is, but there doesn’t seem to be anything he can do to hurry himself up.

“There you go, champ.”

O’Neil looks at his reflection in the mirror, Connor standing beside him with the razor in his hand. He rubs his hands over his cheeks and neck, the firm point of his Adam’s apple.

“Nice,” he says.

“I can do the rest too,” Connor offers, rinsing the blade. “I had to do that in medical school.”

“I’m feeling a little queasy,” O’Neil says. He looks up at his friend, in his hilarious seersucker suit. “How about an appendectomy?”

“Only,” Connor says, “if you promise to hold very, very still.”

Stephen has laid out O’Neil’s clothes on the bed, and while he dresses, Connor and Stephen drink the rest of the beer and talk about Connor’s wedding, which was the summer before, up in Montreal.

“You’re really lucky,” Connor says. He is hunched over in his chair, absently swinging his empty beer between his knees. “A wedding should be small. I look at the pictures now and think, Did I really go to that party? Though you should see them.” He rolls his eyes and clucks his tongue happily. “Like something from a magazine.”

At the mirror O’Neil struggles with his tie. It’s new, with bright swirls of yellow and blue to set off the threads of his suit, and he can’t seem to get the lengths right. He ties it first with a Windsor, then with a double Windsor, and each time the skinny end comes out too long. Then, without thinking, he somehow gets it right; he yanks the ends and a tight dimple appears below the knot. He slides into his jacket, shaking his shoulders to pull loose the shape. He is looking at his reflection, taking it in, when suddenly he remembers: the boutonniere. He was supposed to pick it up that morning at the florist’s across from the hotel. But there is no time now. He takes the rose from Alice ’s tray, squeezes off the stem with his fingernail, and pushes it through the buttonhole of his lapel.

O’Neil turns from the mirror to tell his friends he’s ready, and finds them standing at the far window, their broad backs toward him. His eyes follow their gaze; it is Simone, once again crossing the lot to her car. O’Neil’s first thought is that he isn’t so late after all, that not all the guests have left. But then this thought is pushed aside, he sees Simone through his friends’ eyes, and he knows he is looking at a beautiful woman, maybe the most beautiful woman he has ever seen in his life, crossing the lot below them. Her steps are slow, graceful, without calculation; she seems almost to float. O’Neil is filled with a reverent awe, traveling the length of his body like a beam of light.

“Unbelievable,” Stephen says.

“They’re different from us.” Connor, his hands buried in his pockets, shakes his head in amazement. “It’s really very simple. I speak not as a married man but as a scientist.”

The three men watch while she opens the driver’s door, removes her hat, and, balanced on her slender heels, lowers herself sideways onto the driver’s seat, her legs dangling out of the car so that she can smooth the front of her dress. She pulls the door shut behind her, places the hat on the seat beside her, and arches her back to examine herself in the rearview mirror, pushing a hand through her long hair. The engine purrs to life and she backs out of the drive.

Still they do not move. The silence of the room falls over them. It is as if they have seen an apparition, a sign, as if they have dreamed the same dream together. Then his friends see that he is ready, they gather their things, and they take O’Neil to his wedding.

It is twelve-fifteen by the time they arrive at the house, and O’Neil’s sister meets him at the door. It rained a while back, she tells him, after they spoke on the phone; just a shower, but the path is too muddy to go up the hill.

“I know,” O’Neil says. “Where’s Mrs. Cavanaugh? I’ll talk to her.”

O’Neil enters the crowded house to look for the minister and finds her in the den, taking a last look at her notes for the homily. She is wearing a thick wool sweater under her vestment, and O’Neil hugs her, embarrassing both of them, because he has never hugged her before. “I think we’re going to do it under the tent,” he tells her. “If that’s okay. Plan B.”

They agree to start in about ten minutes, and O’Neil excuses himself to find Mary. But out in the living room he realizes it’s hopeless; Mary is upstairs with her friends, and he knows that if she wanted to see him she would be downstairs now. His gaze travels the packed room. Somehow, everyone seems to know that the wedding is moments away, and O’Neil realizes that, just as he had wished, all the last decisions have been made for him, that his late arrival was expected and understood, as much a part of the fabric of the day as food and vows and the problem of the weather. There is nothing more to do now, nothing to arrange. He sees a photographer gliding through the crowd, and notices for the first time that the room is filled with flowers; he hears, drifting from the lawn outside, the sound of a fiddle, playing a waltz that he and Mary chose a month before, though he does not remember choosing it, just as he does not remember hiring the photographer or ordering the flowers; none of these. Stephen hands him a glass of water, and he drinks it down in one gulp, asks for another, and drinks that down too. It is May twenty-ninth, O’Neil thinks. I am thirty years old. The woman I will marry is upstairs. These simple facts seem suddenly to hold his whole life, and he is glad for it, right down to his bones. They have saved him, though he did not know he had to be saved. And something he heard earlier in the day comes back to him: Then, you and she will be together. That’s the nicest part, I think.

His sister is beside him. “See?” she says. “It’s not so hard.”

“So this is what it’s like.”

“That’s right, hon.” Kay smiles at him and takes his arm. “This is what it’s like.”

She leads him outside. The guests have followed them out to the lawn, and O’Neil sees that chairs have been put under the tent with an aisle for them to pass through, and that the sky is low and gray. He sees that two chairs are empty, where his parents would be, and he remembers what it was like to love them, as, with his sister and Stephen, he follows Erin Cavanaugh to the front of the tent. He turns and as he turns the day drops away and his vision takes in the whole company-Mary’s parents and siblings, the people they work with and have gone to school with, their friends and their children-and in his heart he marries each one of them, for he knows that this is the one sacrament, the one blessing in his life; and then they, too, depart his consciousness, leaving only Mary, who stands at the far end of the tent. Slowly she approaches, her hair wreathed in the deep silence of flowers; then she is there. Mary. He takes her hand, and then, as if they themselves had willed it-as if such acts of love were possible-a soft wind shakes the tent, the air descends, and gently, it begins to rain.