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“No,” Hayden said. “Nobody’s mad.”
Christmas presents, then. Christmas tea, and pulling crackers and plum pudding out on Rhys and Zora’s gorgeous deck. And finally, absolutely unexpectedly, Zora asking him, “D’you think you could do the wedding celebrant thing one more time before you go?”
“What?” Hayden asked. Luke’s head came up, too.
“Rhys told me that a wedding is the only thing he wants for Christmas. And he did give me diamond and pearl earrings, so …” She was laughing, but maybe a little teary, too.
“It’s what I wished!” Casey said, bouncing in her chair, her eyes round. “I got the wishbone in the Christmas pudding, and I wished and wished!”
Hayden said, “Of course I can. You know me, always ready to oblige. You’d need a license to make it official, though.”
“I have a license,” Rhys said. “I put the house as the alternative venue, as I’ve been wishing for quite a while myself.”
“You’re really terrifyingly competent,” Hayden told him, and Rhys smiled.
“You’re supposed to get married in a church, though,” Casey said. “And send fancy invitations first with special handwriting.”
“No, you’re not,” Isaiah said. “There aren’t any rules like that. People get married in all sorts of places. The beach, and a hot-air balloon, and on the top of a mountain on the snow and ice, after they’ve climbed up it with ropes and crampons and everything.”
“No, they don’t,” Casey said. “You have to have lots of people at a wedding, and they sit in chairs with ribbons on them and are very dressed up. And the bride has to have a white dress and fancy flowers, and Auntie Zora has on a red dress. I don’t think they let you get married if it’s not a white dress.”
Isaiah sighed. “You don’t need the chairs or the people. Or a white dress. Gay people can get married now, and men don’t wear a white dress, so how could you have to have it?”
“Oh,” she said. “But don’t you want a white dress?” she asked Zora.
“When you get married for the second time,” she said, “sometimes you don’t wear a white dress, or do it with a big crowd. It’s better if it’s just the people you love most, and here we all are, so it’s perfect.”
“Plus she’s getting married to my dad’s brother,” Isaiah said. “Which is all right, because it’s not her brother, so it’s OK for them to have sex even though he’s my uncle. But heaps of people think it’s not all right, and Uncle Rhys is very famous and very rich, so it might be in the newspaper again if they did a big wedding with a white dress, and people might not be nice.”
“Oh.” Casey considered that. “OK. And we did decorating and we’re all wearing pretty clothes, so maybe it’s all right. Except you’re not very fancy,” she told Luke.
“No,” he said. “I’ll stay out of view if there are any photos, how’s that?”
“Nah, mate,” Rhys said, and he was laughing. “We’re not planning any photos, and we don’t care how anybody looks. This is a Kiwi wedding.”
It had been, too. And there’d been that time before it, when Zora had asked to see Hayden in the bedroom where she’d been getting ready, and he’d sat beside her on the bed and asked, “Is this about the service? If you’d told me ahead of time, I could’ve—”
“Yes,” she said. “Partly. But I wanted to tell you that you’re not some last-minute choice. The wedding idea was last-minute, but you’re the only choice I could have made. When Dylan was dying and I was so tired that I could barely put one foot in front of the other, when the money was gone and I was so worried, you were always there. When you came over to cut my grass every week and take Isaiah to Kelly Tarlton to see the sea turtles, or to the planetarium … you’re the best brother ever, and the best uncle, and I need to tell you that today. Also, cheers for being as unacceptable as me, of course. We’re in this together, hey. The two of us.” The tears were sparkling on her lashes, and she gave a little laugh and pressed her fingers to her eyes.
“Oi.” Hayden put up his hand, fist out. She bumped it with hers, and then they took hold of little fingers and shook. Their secret handshake, which they hadn’t done since they were about ten. Hayden was getting a little choked up himself, to tell the truth.
“Geez. You’re crying now?” he asked her, grabbing a tissue from the bedside table and doing some careful dabbing at her eyes. “You’re wrecking your makeup. And same here. Who’s had my back at every hideous family dinner?”
“Don’t let Dad get to you,” Zora said. “Though I think Mum must have said something.”
“I think so, too. Only possible explanation. Think she broke her bowl on purpose? It looked that way to me.”
“Hard to imagine,” she said, “but if she did—” She tried to laugh. “That’s love, eh.”
“The Royal Copenhagen Full Lace serving bowl?” Hayden said. “Yeh, I’d say so. And—service? Ideas?”
“Yes.” She reached over to grab a piece of paper. “This is what we want to say.”
Hayden sat, now, in the chill and the noise and the smell of bad beer—rugby stadiums were all the same, even in France—and remembered the look on his sister’s face when he’d prompted Rhys with the words, when the moment was so pure that it hurt your heart.
“With this ring I thee wed,” Rhys had pronounced with the conviction of a man who knew exactly what he’d found and that it was forever, as he slid that ring home. “With my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”
Better than anything Hayden could’ve written, even if it was five hundred years old. Well, once they’d taken out the “obey” part, anyway.
