But tonight the question has returned, and her response is much worse than before. She is frozen at the stove, one hand in a fist on her hip, the other holding the knob that produces no spark, no flame. Luke has just left, and behind him the door to the screened porch has just slammed. With words she can’t recognize, she has driven him away. She fiddles with the knob, twists it all the way left again and waits for the stove to light, but instead there is only the faint smell of gas. Oh, shit, she mutters, thinking the pilot might have gone out again. It was so hard to tell with this stove. Sometimes it would light right away, explode in a fireball, or it would take forever or not at all. She turns the dial all the way right, off, and as usual it sparks—once, twice, again, again . . . It will quit after a few minutes, or maybe longer, but eventually the ticking will stop. It’s been like this for years. She will replace this heap, she swears to herself every time it fails to light, like now, and keeps ticking long after the burner has been turned off. She will replace it when she fixes the torn screen on the porch and the broken dryer downstairs, but not until after the wedding, not until things settle down. She leaves the stove and rushes through the porch door and out toward the lawn. She pauses to let her eyes adjust, for the blank dark to fill with the shapes of trees, shed, field, tent. Near the far tree line at the back of the field, she can see the bright smudge of Luke’s white shirt above the tall grass. She runs toward it.
On the mown path along the edge of the field she follows his figure to the woods, where it disappears off the nearest trailhead. The moon is nearly full, and the field, the woods, the far-off Berkshires, are lit with a silver light, as if the world were an exposed negative. By the time she steps onto the trail that leads to the Unification Church property, she’s lost him. She scans for any flash of Luke’s shirt and calls out his name as she goes, careful not to trip on a root or rock on the path. She follows the trail they have walked together a thousand times and remembers again the night he asked her to marry him, how unprepared she was for the question and how relieved she was to derail the prospect, at least for a little while. There was no one else she wanted to be with, but even beyond the issues with Lolly the idea of marrying again was difficult to engage. Prenups, the fear that he would resent her for not being able to give him children, the embarrassment of their age difference, the memory of her bitter divorce with Adam—all these things would crowd in and it would be impossible to imagine.
For an hour she follows the path—through the woods, along the back lawn of the Unification Church, and down the road that circles back to the side field of her property. Even in the moonlit night, she cannot find him. She steps into the field and can see across it to the dark mass that is her house and the silhouette of the great white tent that has been assembled for the wedding reception tomorrow. It looks like a giant dog curled at the foot of the house, guarding her sleeping family. She starts to cross the field and stops when she hears a twig snap behind her. She calls Luke’s name and walks back onto the trail a few yards in and calls again. An owl sounds a muffled taunt in response. Fool. Fool. Fool.
She leaves the woods and slowly makes her way along the mown path toward the lawn, listening behind her as she goes. She reaches the tent and looks back before stepping inside. She scans the eerie, silver-tinted field and the trees beyond, but does not see Luke.
She steps inside the tent toward the end of one of the three long reception tables not yet set with china and flowers. She sits down on one of the wooden folding chairs and thinks of the clamor and laughter that will fill this space tomorrow and remembers her wedding to Adam twenty-three years ago. She was pregnant with Lolly but no one, not even Adam knew. She had not taken a test nor seen a doctor yet, but she knew, and she remembered thinking she now had what she needed from a husband: a child—and therefore could disappear and start her life over with her son or her daughter and not have to go through with all of the rest of it. She hadn’t thought of that night or her escape fantasy in over twenty years. It had never occurred to her before now to imagine what it would be like to be married to someone who had these thoughts the night before her wedding. She wonders if Adam registered her ambivalence then and for the first time considers how those feelings might have set an early course for what would later play out in their marriage. She wonders if Lolly is having the same thoughts now, lying awake beside her husband-to-be, plotting a secret flight before dawn. Not likely. But then who would have imagined anything that June was thinking all those years ago; on the surface she was a giddy bride marrying her college love, continuing a life in New York that seemed blessed. Still, deep down she knew it was more likely to fall apart than succeed. She knew, but she smothered that knowing with the future that everyone in her life saw for them and that she could, through their eyes, occasionally see. Her father was struggling with a bad heart then and her mother died when she was in college, so there was also, she remembers now, a feeling of needing to be anchored, placed in the world.
She experiences an unfamiliar mix of compassion and resentment when she thinks of Adam sleeping upstairs in the house. She remembers Lolly insisting he spend the weekend with them and is grateful she eventually backed away from that fight. It escalated quickly the day before he came, and after a sharp exchange and a long walk in the woods, it became clear that if she insisted Adam stay at the Betsy, where she’d booked him a room, the weekend would be ruined and it would demolish all progress she and Lolly had made and sabotage the chance for more. And Lolly was right. Adam’s being around had been easy and felt strangely comfortable. She cringes as she thinks how close she came to drawing the line and refusing, what the fallout would have been. She holds her head in her hands and squeezes.
She sees Luke. Months ago, on one knee, proposing; the pink enamel ring wedged in its gray velvet box, the destroyed look in his eyes when she laughed. His confused and beautiful face tonight when he stood in the kitchen and asked, plainly and without anger, Why? What she said next came not from anything she believed or meant but what she imagined others saying, what she feared her friends in the city snickered behind her back, and the small-town gossips murmured at the grocery store. What she said held all the agitation she felt because the evening with Lolly had ended on a sour note, because the subject of Luke and June’s getting married had come up at all, and because Luke hadn’t just simply brushed it off and restored ease. What she said next were words she would do anything to retrieve. Because you’re not the guy someone like me marries, you’re the guy someone like me ends up with after their marriage is over. She heard the words for the first time as she said them, had not thought them through, considered or uttered them to herself before, under her breath or out loud. She saw them fly and hit their target, and as he stormed away, she turned the dial on the stove to the right, off, and with the slam of the screen door and the riot of tree frogs and cicadas outside, the ticking began.
She pulls her legs toward her chest and positions her tennis shoes on the edge of the folding chair and looks up into the billowing silver-white tent. She rocks, slowly, feeling the guilty, shameful bruise of being wrong spread across her chest and up her neck to her face. How could she be so cruel to a man who had only ever offered her friendship and kindness and love? She knows the only way he will ever forgive her, the only hope they could have after what she has said is for her to simply say yes. To marry him. She is fifty-two; Luke is thirty. They have known each other for three years, and never has he been dishonest or unkind. Careless, maybe. Selfish, yes. Impatient, sometimes. But he has been more of a partner to her than Adam ever was, and she trusts him. And unlike Adam, who avoided her physically after Lolly was born, Luke found ways to touch her all through the day. His fingers would often brush across the top of her arms, his hands constantly palming her backside when she crossed in front of him. And the sex, though more frequent than she might have preferred, was often as emotionally overwhelming as it was physically surprising. His body, in clothes and out, still shocked her, and touching him could send her into girlish fits of giggling or silence her completely. Why should she let her past and her pride stop her from giving him what he wants? What she wants. She stretches her legs and places her feet on the chair in front of her. She breathes in the still night air and feels the muscles in her shoulders and neck loosen as she exhales. There it is, she thinks to herself, remembering a similar feeling of relief when she decided to leave Adam. She remembers, too, how after she’d made the decision she looked back on the preceding years of her marriage—all the doubt and lies and clues—and wondered why it took so long to do what was suddenly so obvious. These were the questions then and the questions now. Why were some decisions so tortured and then not? Why has she only ever learned the most important lessons at the speed of great pain?
She pulls her jacket across her chest and settles into the two folding chairs she’s made into a makeshift bed. She will wait for him to come back. She will stay out here in the summer night, with the deer sneezing in the woods and the frogs chirping from the trees. She will wait for him here. Under this wedding tent, she will wait. And she will say yes.