He held on to her the way a man holds the one thing he’s decided never to let go of again.When he kissed her, it was unhurried and certain, a vow paid in advance.The kettle began to sing behind them as if it had been waiting all its life for an occasion worthy of its song.
“Stay for supper,” he said against her hair.“Go get the whole herd and bring them back here where they belong.Madi too.I’ll cook.”
“You’ll burn it.”
“I will burn it,” he agreed, “and I’ll run down to the diner and Rose will pack us a big bag of take-out food.It’ll be the best meal served in this town tonight.”
She laughed into the front of his shirt.
He walked her out through the office.At the side table by the front window he stopped, and with her hand still in his, he reached over and turned on the small lamp.Its warm light fell across the porch boards and out into the blue shadows lengthening on the porch.
“I’m leaving it lit from now on,” he said.“Not so you can find your way here anymore.Everybody this light was ever for is already home, or about to be.It’s staying lit because this house is done being dark.”
He walked her outside, and she rose up on her toes in the soft glow of the lamp and kissed him in full view of the entire street.
Behind one of those windows, Sunny would bet the whole Montenegro account that news of the town’s accountant kissing its doctor’s lights out was already moving toward Ruth Sanger at the speed of light.
21
The magazine people arrived at seven in the morning on the second Saturday in July, and by eight Hank’s house was full of ladders, cameras, lights, and cables, which was everything he’d been promised back in May and had dreaded like a root canal ever since.
He stood in the doorway of his own front parlor with a cup of coffee and discovered he didn’t mind it at all.
The photographer, a brisk woman from New York named Dani, had walked into the foyer, stopped dead under the fourteen-foot ceiling, looked up the curve of the restored staircase with its hundred and ten years of hands worn into the banister, and breathed one word, reverently.“Patina.”
Tessa, standing behind her, had caught Sunny’s eye across the hall and mouthed,Told you,and Sunny had laughed her whole laugh, the unguarded one she laughed a lot these day.The photo shoot had proceeded from there in the best possible way.
They shot the composite gown made of all the WoWS wedding dresses on Jenna at the foot of the staircase, with the morning light streaming in through the tall windows in long honeyed columns.
Charlotte hovered with pins in her mouth, adjusting folds of fabric a quarter inch at a time.Hank, who knew nothing about gowns and intended to keep it that way, knew enough to understand what he was looking at, though.
Eight widows’ dresses, the ones they’d each been married in, had been carefully taken apart and rebuilt into one dress for the first of them to marry again.The dress was eight stories in one.The magazine could have its glossy pages.This dress and its story belonged to this town and always would.
“The dish rail,” Dani said at one point, aiming her chin at the dining room, where Presley’s framed drawing of a pair of hands playing a guitar stood propped among the gleam of the picture lights.“Whose work is that?I want it in the establishing shots.”
“Local artist,” Hank said gravely.“She’s ten.Her gallery rate is going up as we speak.”
Madison, on quality control as always, charged the magazine five dollars on Presley’s behalf for the rights.Dani paid it in cash, laughing, and called it the best contract negotiation she’d survived all year.
By eleven the crew had what it needed.The eight bridesmaids—Sunny had argued against being included in the wedding party since she was a newcomer to town and been unanimously overruled—were photographed in a pastel row on the front porch, eight gowns designed to fit each of them just right, none of them alive.They were made in eight shades Charlotte had matched to each of them.Molly wore green as befit an herb farmer.Rose wore mauve because it was her favorite and also her best color.Bonnie wore robin’s-egg blue to match her eyes.Natalie was dressed in yellow to match her personality, and Tessa in pale ice blue to match hers.Grace wore pastel pink as delicate as her coloring, and Charlotte had made a lavender gown for herself .Sunny’s gown was a warm peach color that made her auburn hair glow like a fiery sunset.
Hank looked at her exactly as long as a man could look without becoming the latest gossip, which in Cobbler Cove was not long, and went upstairs to hide until the commotion wound down.
Cobbler Cove Church had been built in 1911 out of the valley’s native stone, blue and gray and white under a white steeple.Inside it was light and bright with tall windows pouring early afternoon sun across dark-wood pews and a floor of the same stone as the walls.By one o’clock it held every soul in Cobbler Cove who could walk, ride, or be carried there.
The seven Shoemacher children had been delighted to be included in this momentous event and all of them had taken time off jobs and out of their lives to come back for it.They sat together in a pew halfway back, present, invited, and looking only a little like people braced for bad weather, which by Hank’s measure said they were healing at a gallop.
The grooms’ side of the altar was crowded.Sully Crawford stood at the head of it with his jaw set like a man about to ride the eight most important seconds of his life.Strung out behind him were all the cowboys he’d dragged to the Foster Ranch last fall.His brothers, Cash and Boone.Cooper, Tucker, and Gray Lawson.And last but not least, the three Steele brothers.Nine men who’d come to this town and had their lives taken apart and completely rebuilt by this place, newer, stronger, and better, same as Jenna’s gown.
“You called dibs,” Reno murmured out the side of his mouth as the organist took her place behind the altar and the church began to go quiet.“Back in May.There were only seven bridesmaids back then and eight of us cowboys, and you called dibs on being the man who got to sit out.”
“I remember.”
“And then the WoWS went and found themselves a ninth member.”Reno’s gaze slid down the aisle to where the bridesmaids were assembling at the back of the church.“Funny how that math worked out.”
“Quit talking in church,” Hank muttered back.“Didn’t your mama teach you any manners?”
His brother grinned like a rodeo clown who’d just heard the chute open on a big, rank bull.
