"Astrid."
"That's enough, Easton. I heard the rest of it four times."
A laugh went through the chairs.
She lifted her chin.
She drew a breath. The breath went in jagged. She'd told me the night before, with her hand on my chest in the dark, that hers had a paragraph about the bank of the lake and a paragraph about a kitchen counter with my grandmother's dog at the back door, and that she'd been practicing the start of it in the bathroom mirror that morning at six.
She didn't get hers out either.
She got the first three words.
"You came back."
Her mother sobbed in the front row.
Astrid closed her eyes.
She opened them.
She lifted her hand to the side of my face.
"You came back," she said again, "and I'm going to spend the rest of my life being grateful for it."
I didn't have a sentence for that.
I bent down. I put my forehead against hers. Pastor Holm waited with his hands folded in front of him and the patience of a man who had decided the bride and the groom were going to take the time they needed.
We took the time we needed.
Moose stood with the rings on his collar at the foot of the arch and waited, too.
The reception ran past midnight.
Duke got up at the first toast and went through the pinball machine in his basement, the morning he'd found me eating eggs at the firehouse counter the day I'd told him there was somebody, and the night of the cat in the engine compartment. He landed on a line he'd been holding for the end: "I have never seen a man pretend not to be in love harder than Easton Ford, and I have never seen a man fail at pretending faster."
He raised his glass. He looked at me across the table with a look he didn't give me in mixed company, the look of a man who was telling me, in front of all of these people, that he was glad I was where I was. I lifted mine back.
Audrey got up second and roasted Astrid with surgical precision and the love that made it land softer than it should have. She told the story of the bath towel, the version she'd been telling since October, with the timing she'd honed against an audience over months. She got to the part about the bra in Moose's mouth, and the backyard came apart. She landed on a line that wasn't a joke: "I have known Astrid Matthews for twenty-two years, and I have never seen her this happy. Easton, you keep her there."
She lifted her glass. Astrid was crying. I was holding her hand under the table.
Astrid's mother danced with me in the third song. Halfway through, she looked up at me and said, in a voice only I could hear, "I'm glad it's you." She patted my shoulder once at the endof the song, and I walked her back to her husband in the front row.
Shane, Brian, and Garrett cornered me at the bar around eleven.
They'd been waiting for their turn.
Shane had a beer in his hand. Brian had a glass of water because he was on baby duty. Garrett had a bourbon. They'd brought their wives, and the wives had cornered Astrid an hour earlier and were on the back patio with Audrey. Audrey had been laughing harder than I'd seen Audrey laugh in a year.
"Ford."
"Briggs."
"You did good."
"Yeah."
