arrangement of satin and lace.
“I…I don’t understand, Gabe,” she said.
He turned her toward him, smiling at her. “Will you marry me?” he asked. “Here? Tomorrow? Out there?” He nodded toward the view outside the window. “On the bluff overlooking the ocean?”
For just an instant, she felt torn, thinking of the wedding she’d long dreamed about, where she and Gabriel would be surrounded by family and friends. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that she would become Gabriel’s wife. Tomorrow night, they’d be able to share a hotel room for the first time. She would be Lisbeth Johnson.
She threw herself into his arms. “Yes, of course I will!” she said. “How on earth did you know about the dress?”
“Does it matter?”
“No…except that I’m thinner than I was when I last tried it on.”
“It will fit,” he promised. “And I’ll find someone here who can take pictures of you in it, so you can show everyone back home how beautiful you looked.”
The minister was to meet them on the bluff at eleven the following morning, and at ten, Lisbeth put on the dress and styled her hair, which would probably fall flat once she was out in the damp, cool air above the ocean. But she didn’t care. There was no full-length mirror in her room, but she knew the dress fit perfectly, and the beauty of wearing it was more in the
At ten of eleven, Gabriel knocked on her door. She pulled the door open, and Gabriel’s eyes glistened behind his glasses when he saw her. “You are the most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. “And you look beautiful yourself.” He was wearing a white tuxedo she had never seen him in before, a red carnation in his lapel.
He put his hands on her arms and looked into her eyes. “I wasn’t going to tell you this,” he said. “I wanted it to be a surprise, but I know how sad you must feel that Carlynn’s not here with you. So, I’m going to tell you that she is.”
Her mouth dropped open. “She is? Where?”
“She and Alan will meet us on the bluff, okay?”
“Oh, yes!” she said. “Thank you so much, Gabe.”
“And she has flowers for you,” he added.
She laughed, slipping her hand through the arm he offered her.
It took them a few minutes to get down the narrow stairs of the inn. Her dress was perfectly tailored with a narrow cut that hugged her slender body, but Gabriel had to carry the long train in his arms to prevent them both from falling headlong down the stairs.
They started walking toward the cliff overlooking the water, Lisbeth searching for three people—Carlynn, Alan and the minister—but she was distressed to see another crowd on the bluff, as there had been the day before. Probably another scattering of ashes, she thought, and it was only as they neared the throng of people that she began to make out faces. Carlynn. Alan. Lloyd Peterson and his wife. Gabriel’s mother and sister, aunts and uncles and cousins from Oakland. Their boating friends. All of them standing there on the bluff, grinning at the stunned look on her face.
Gabriel clutched her hand where it rested on his arm.
“Surprise, baby,” he whispered to her. “We’ve been planning this for months.”
She was unable to take another step forward as she began to cry. Carlynn ran out from the crowd to hug her, hard, and handed her a bouquet of red roses, and the Negro minister from the Johnson family’s Oakland church walked toward her and Gabriel, since Lisbeth seemed unable to move herself.
“We assumed you wouldn’t mind if I was your matron of honor,” Carlynn whispered as she took her place next to her.
Lisbeth shook her head numbly, noticing that Alan stood next to Gabriel as his best man. She floated through the ceremony, touched beyond words that Gabriel had planned this, going back in her mind over clues she’d missed: Lloyd allowing her to go on this trip after pretending to be against it; Carlynn asking her a month or so ago if she thought they were exactly the same size now; the Fourth of July celebration at Gabriel’s mother’s house, when the chattering in the kitchen had stopped the moment Lisbeth had walked into the room.
She barely heard the words of the minister, managing by some miracle to get the “I do” in the right place. Her eyes were on her husband as she waited for the moment she could wrap her arms around him, telling him she would never forget this gift he had given her.
They celebrated in the side yard of the inn with a feast and three-tiered wedding cake served under a huge tent which had been miraculously erected in the garden during the ceremony. And afterward, she and Gabriel retired to the honeymoon cottage, located a distance from the inn itself, where the innkeeper had already moved their luggage.
In bed that night, Gabriel held her close.
“Do you mind that I did it this way?” he asked. “I saw all the anguish Carlynn went through in planning her wedding, and I just didn’t want any of those crazy family problems to get in the way of your day. But you didn’t get to do any of the planning, yourself, and I worried that—”
She kissed him to stop his talking. “This was perfect,” she said. “The fact that you did this for me, for us…I can’t think of anything more remarkable you could have done.”
She snuggled against him. She didn’t care about planning a wedding, or even about the quaint little honeymoon cottage, or the view from the bluffs, or the dress she had worn. At that moment, she didn’t even care about her mother’s will, which would no longer contain Lisbeth’s name except to acknowledge her as the daughter to whom Delora would leave nothing. All she cared about now was the man lying by her side.
