Page 70 of Hot Dad Summer

“Flynn Calloway!” Kacey threw a hairbrush at the gap. “It’s bad luck!”

“That’s for seeing the dress. There’s no rule about hearing the bride.” A pause. “Hi, sweetheart.”

“Hi, honey.”

“Just checking you didn’t run off with a takeout driver.”

“If you walk in here right now, I might have to, but no he is busy on an important job today.”

That part was true. Rat was out there right now directing parking like a secret service agent, having appointed himself head of security the moment the invitation reached him. He’d shown up in a suit that almost fit and shaken Wes’s hand for a full ten seconds, as Wes eyed him extra carefully.

The door clicked shut, and I heard scuffling, and then a deeper voice through the wood. “Daisy.”

“Wes.”

“The chairs are done. The arch is up.” He paused, and I could hear him searching for something to say. “I grilled you a plain chicken breast in case you forgot to eat. It’s in the fridge behind the flowers.”

I pressed my hand over my mouth. Kacey mouthed oh my God at me in the mirror.

“I love you too,” I called, and his footsteps went away sounding satisfied.

Max didn’t come to the door. Max had simply left a small wooden box on my chair that morning, sanded smooth, with a note in his blunt handwriting that said FOR THE BOBBY PINS. YOU LOSE THEM. And then I’d cried about a bobby pin box at seven a.m..

It was almost noon when Hazel appeared in the doorway and asked if she could borrow me. Something in her face made me follow without one question.

She led me upstairs to my old bedroom, the one I’d locked myself into a year ago on the worst night of the summer, and sat me down on the bed. From behind her back she produced something wrapped in brown paper and baker’s twine, which was how she knew I wrapped the things that mattered.

“We finished it,” she said. “Me and you started it, but I did the last part myself. Dad helped me with the printer.”

I untied the twine with hands that already knew. The memory book. A year of Sunday afternoons, the two of us at the bakery counter after close, gluing down photographs of a woman I’d never met and writing down every story Wes and the aunts and the whole town could tell us. Sarah laughing on the dock. Sarah pregnant in a sundress. Sarah holding a red-faced newborn Hazel like she’d invented her.

But Hazel had added pages at the back. New paper, her careful ruler-straight lines. The first one had a photograph of all of us from Hank’s birthday last summer, soaked and sunburned and laughing, and above it she’d written, in her serious ten-year-old hand, Part Two.

The next page was empty except for a small pencil rectangle, and inside the rectangle it said wedding photo goes here.

“Mom’s love filled up the whole world,” Hazel said, matter-of-fact. “That’s what you told me. But yours fills up the house. I figured the book should have both.”

Moments later my makeup was destroyed, and I pulled that little girl into my lap and held on while she patted my arm. Kacey found us like that, took one look, and turned around to get her kit. “This is why we do waterproof mascara,” she said, but her voice was thick too.

The afternoon disappeared the way wedding afternoons do, in a blur of hairpins and photographs and someone yelling about boutonnieres, and then somehow it was golden hour and Kacey was fluffing my dress at the top of the lawn and it was time.

Nobody gave me away, because I’d already given myself, a year ago, in a kitchen, to this exact family. I walked the lawn alone with my flowers while Poppy hurled petals like she was suppressing enemy fire and Charlie carried the rings on Max’s little wooden pillow and Hank marched beside me in his bowtie like he was the one getting married, and half the town stood up and turned, and I looked down the white aisle to the arch by the water and almost sat down in the grass.

Three men in gray suits were waiting for me, and not one of them was playing it cool.

Flynn was already crying. Wes stood tall and proud like the dock pilings, but his jaw was working and his eyes were shining. And Max, watched me come down that aisle with his whole heart sitting undefended on his face, and I understood that I was seeing something no one else on that lawn had ever seen.

In the second row from the back, on the aisle, my mother gave me a warm smile and a gentle nod. My father nodded beside her, gray around the edges.

A year of careful phone calls had gone into those two chairs. Short ones at first, on my terms, a little longer each month. They’d asked to come. I’d said they could sit in the back. It wasn’t forgiveness, not yet, but it was two chairs at my wedding, and watching my mother watch me walk toward the three men I loved, I felt something old in my chest loosen by a degree.

Brooke wasn’t there. She was eight months into real therapy that she went to twice a week and paid for herself, and her card had arrived on Tuesday with a gift certificate for a couples massage for four, which made all of us laugh and which I took as progress. Tyler wasn’t there either. Last anyone heard, he was in New York, barely keeping his new business afloat, still in therapy of his own. Maybe someday. It just wasn’t my account to balance anymore.

The ceremony itself, I remember in pieces. Pastor Jim from the village, who’d baptized all three of them and did not blink at the arithmetic of the day, because only one marriage went on paper but all three went on the record, and I’d said my whole life that paperwork was for taxes and promises were for people. Flynn vowing to make me laugh in every room of every building we ever owned. Wes vowing to feed me, protect me, and never once let me carry a thing alone again. And Max, who the whole lawn leaned in to hear, looking at me for a long moment and saying, “You’re it. You were always it. “

By the time we kissed, half the lawn was crying right along with us.

The reception blurred by in fairy lights and champagne, my town and my people and my kids running wild on the grass. I danced with each of my husbands, then all of them, laughing in the middle of six hands while everyone cheered. Even my parents stayed for cake, and my mother told me, quietly, off to the side, that it was the best cake she’d ever eaten and that I deserved all of my happiness.