I didn't.
I clapped him on the shoulder on my way out.
I was at the back window of the kitchen at eleven-thirty, with my own jacket over the chair and the cuffs of my shirt still unbuttoned, looking out at the chairs in the grass with my coffee in one hand.
The chairs were full.
The Bishops were in the third row with Cooper between them, and Cooper had on a navy bowtie that the Bishop boy had picked out himself. Mrs. Halloran was in the fifth row in a hat the size of a hubcap. Halsey was in the back with his wife and his cat, who was on a leash and was not having any of it. Mendoza was in the back too, with his terrier in his lap. Caldwell was in the last row, on the aisle, in the suit he'd gotten married in in 1981.
My mother sent a card. I read it at the kitchen counter that morning and set it down and went back to the coffee. The yard was full. That was the whole thing.
Shane and Maya were in the row in front of him. Brian and Ava beside them with the baby asleep on Brian's chest. Garrett and Sloane on Maya's other side. Theo between them, in a clip-on tie with a paperback open on his knee.
Astrid's parents were in the front row. Her mother was already crying. Her father had his arm around her shoulders, hishand cupped against the side of her arm, steady, the hold of a man who had been married forty years and understood why she was crying and was not going to make her explain. He was a tall man, gone gray, with Astrid's green eyes.
He'd shaken my hand at the front door the day before and not let go for a count of three, and he'd said, in a voice he'd practiced, "You take good care of her, Easton."
I'd said I would.
Audrey came around the side of the bungalow at eleven-forty-five.
She was in the sage dress, her hair pinned at the nape. She had a bouquet of pink and cream tied with a length of cream ribbon. She crossed the back patio to the porch and lifted her chin at me through the back door.
"Ford."
"Callahan."
"Are you ready?"
"I'm ready."
"You're not crying."
"Not yet."
"Mhm."
She looked at me one beat longer than she needed to. The look was the one she'd been giving me since November, when she hadn't said his name and I hadn't said hers, and we'd both been on Astrid's side of the same thing without admitting we were on the same side.
She went around to the side gate to start the bridal party.
Moose came out of the kitchen.
He had on a navy collar that Audrey had decorated with cream ribbon and a small spray of pink rose, and the rings tied to the collar with a length of the same ribbon, the bows Audrey had practiced for a week. He looked at me at the back door. He looked at the chairs in the grass. He looked back at me.
"Are you ready, buddy?"
He thumped his tail once.
"Don't eat the rings."
He thumped it again.
The band started.
I came down the back porch steps in my jacket and the cuffs Audrey had buttoned for me at the last second because my hands had stopped working. I walked the length of the grass aisle with Moose at my left hip, because Moose had been at my left hip for eight months and wasn't going to be at my right hip on the day of. I went up to the arch at the rose end, and I turned around.
Audrey came down the aisle first.
