The processional was a parade of everything the town had been through and come out the other side of.
Lily scattered white rose petals with the focus of a surgeon.Bobby Foster, six years old and solemn as a deacon in his small boots, walked his mother down the aisle, and gave her away at the altar in a clear voice that took the entire church’s heart clean out of its chest.
Chloe escaped the Carter pew at a crucial moment, but was intercepted by Madison before she reached the open space in front of the pews.The toddler spent the remainder of the ceremony on Madison’s lap, narrating in a whisper that everyone in the church could hear between the proceedings up front , that all present were now horses.
The groomsmen joined the bridesmaids in the back and each of the widows came down the aisle on the arm of the cowboy she’d agreed to marry, one healed story at a time.The last pair, Hank with Sunny’s hand resting warm in the crook of his elbow, walked past every person in town, none of whom were even pretending not to grin knowingly at the two of them.
The vows were the traditional ones with old-fashioned I do’s, which was how folks around here liked them.Sully’s voice cracked onin sickness and in healthand steadied onas long as we both shall live.Jenna, looking radiant in a gown made of eight marriages, said her part looking back and forth between her son in the front pew and the man in front of her, and not one person in that church found anything wrong with that.
Hank stood at the anchor end of the line and watched Sunny across the church, and the thing he’d carried up the church steps in his breast pocket sat against his heart, patient and waiting for the right moment, the way all the best things in life are worth waiting for.
The reception filled Hank’s house to its hundred-and-ten-year-old rafters, which was, Hank understood at long last, the entire point of the house.
Grace’s magnificent cake stood five tiers tall in the dining room, and her flowers ran down the center of every table, whites and creams and blushes spilling out of mason jars that were both elegant and country casual, entirely fitting for this wedding and this town.
The twins conducted tours of the laundry chute for a nickel a head until Sunny shut the enterprise down on safety grounds and Madison, as standing counsel, oversaw the twins’ reluctant refunds.Ruth Sanger held court in the front parlor in her good pearls, and the Shoemacher children stood in the kitchen being fed by Rose, which in this town was citizenship, notarized.
The toasts began at sunset.
Cooper toasted the bride.Cash toasted the groom.Boone toasted the casserole brigade of Cobbler Cove, without whom, he noted, not one man on the premises would have survived to his own wedding.
And then Reno stood up on a chair with a glass in his hand and the look of a lawyer approaching his closing argument, and Hank felt the whole evening turn and point itself at him like a compass needle finding north.
“Nine months ago,” Reno said, “Sully Crawford was just passing through this town on his way to another rodeo.Look at him now.And look at the rest of us.Every man standing up at that altar today followed him to this town one way or another.Which is to say, it’sall your faultwe’re here, Sully.”
That got a round of laughter, and the other cowboys razzed Sully for a few moments before Reno continued.
“This town took each of us guys apart like old busted-up cars and rebuilt every last one of us.As if that wasn’t enough, this town handed every last one of us a woman way,waytoo good for him.”
He waited out the laughter.
“Every one of us found a home in Cobbler Cove.We found love, and we found the families we’d been missing out on.Every single one of us.”His gaze drifted, slow and deliberate as a search light, until it stopped on his oldest brother.“Except, of course, for the man whose house we’re all standing in.”
The room’s laughter rolled toward Hank, warm and fond and merciless, three hundred faces turning his way.He saw Madison’s among them, and Sunny’s blushing brightly by the dining room door with Chloe asleep on her shoulder.
Hank set down his glass and stood up.
“Reno’s right,” he said, and the laughter banked itself to listen because Doc Steele wasn’t known for making speeches.“I bought this house because I needed a home to bring my daughter to and a place to see my patients.I had a family once, but I lost most of it, and I reached a conclusion about myself that I held onto for a very long time.I won’t repeat what that conclusion was at a wedding, except to say that I was wrong, and it took the stubbornest woman in Montana to convince me of that.”He came around the table.The room had gone so quiet the ceiling fans turning overhead could be heard.“I’m done sitting out this whole romance magic of Cobbler Cove’s.I want a family of my own again.I want a loud table and a full house and a kettle that never gets to go cold.And there’s exactly one woman on this earth I want it with.”
He crossed the parlor floor she’d brought back from the dead, and he went down on one knee in front of Sunny in plain sight of the entire town.He took out of his breast pocket an antique ring Madison had helped him pick out.She’d sworn it was perfect and Sunny would love it, and he trusted his daughter’s judgment completely.
“Susannah Carter,” he said formally, “Will you do me the greatest honor of marrying me?”
Chloe woke up, blinking into the pregnant silence.The room held its breath as Sunny looked down at him, her eyes shining and her chin held high.Being the woman she was talking to the man he was, she answered his proposal with the unvarnished truth.
“I already wrote it down,” she said.“In ink.Yes.”
A cheer went up that just about knocked the house off its foundation.Somewhere in the roar, Grace was crying into Reno’s lapel, Ruth Sanger was committing every detail to memory for future retellings, and Jenna Crawford, one hour married, was applauding the upstaging of her own wedding like it was the best wedding gift she could’ve asked for, which, she would insist for years afterward, it was.
Hank stood and put the ring on Sunny’s finger, and then, because the next part mattered more to him than the ring did, he kept hold of her hand and said the rest of it quietly, underneath the noise, for her alone.
“You lost your name to a man once, and you had to claw your own back out of the wreckage of his life.I will not be a second man to take your name from you.So it’s your choice, and any answer is the right one.Keep Carter.Hyphenate it.Take my name if you’d like.I just want you by whatever name you choose to call yourself.”
Sunny, who’d been given many things by many people but had never once been handed the freedom of choice itself, felt the last locked door inside her open at his offer, exactly the way stubborn locks finally give way when nobody is trying to force them open.
“Steele,” she said.“Just Steele.Perry was taken from me.Carter I dug back out with my own hands.This is the first name I’ve ever gotten to choose, and I’m choosing Steele.Sunny Steele.”
“That’s a terrible name,” Madison said, arriving with the other four children in formation behind her.“It sounds like a cartoon superhero.But I love it.”
