Blake froze. Then he burst into tears.
“Get. Inside. The. Church!” Claire screamed. The llama started its battered-turkey wail again. “Walk slowly! Slowly, Blake! I’ve got the EpiPens.” She turned to her husband and said, “You need to go in there and sit with him. I’ve got to watch the llama.”
“He’s not going to want to stay inside when all the fun is out here,” Edmund pointed out.
“Yeah, well, what do we do about the bees, Edmund? Have you noticed there are at least a million bees around here?” Claire said. “Do you want to spend the night with him in the ICU or shall I?”
“I’ll keep him in the church,” said Edmund. “Can I have your phone so he can play something on it?”
“Why can’t you use yours?”
“I need mine,” said Edmund.
“Right. To play something on,” said Claire. She took her phone out of her bag. “Here. Take it.”
Andrew Callahan, who had overheard the entire thing, said to Claire, “Those are Gordon Allen’s bees.”
“What?” asked Claire. “What are you talking about?”
“Gordon Allen put half a million honeybees on his land so he could qualify for an agricultural tax exemption. Those bees cost the town of Beekman tens of thousands of dollars in property taxes each year.”
“Are you serious?” said Claire.
“It’s in the town tax rolls,” said Andrew. “They’re public record.”
“My son can die of a bee sting,” said Claire. “I don’t want half a million unnecessary bees around here because a fucking billionaire doesn’t want to pay his fair share of the taxes.”
“Well, you could sue him if your kid got stung.”
Claire cocked her head and looked at Andrew with a plastered-on smile. “You mean if my child were dead? I could sue Gordon Allen? Does that sound like a good outcome to you?”
Susan walked over and said to Claire, “I just talked to Edmund. He says he won’t wear a skirt.”
Claire sighed a big wifely sigh. “Oh, just hand it to me,” she said. “Keep an eye on the llama. I’ll take care of it.”
*
Between Claire’s frantic bee freak-out, which sent at least three toddlers wailing into their moms’ arms, and the Larkin twins screaming that they wanted to ride “the stupid pony or whatever it is”—not to mention the sullen, hungover husbands who exchanged grim glances to acknowledge they’d normally be teeing off on the back nine and cracking open their fifth IPA beer on any other Sunday as beautiful as this one was shaping up to be—the event was starting to look like a fiasco.
But just then, the opening chords of Bach’s “Air on the G String” floated up from the church organ, out through the open stained-glass windows, and up through the trees, piercing the achingly blue sky. It was a piece of music that never failed to reach deep inside Lucy and evoke what she thought of as the purest, best part of herself. The fact that this sublime perfection was being played by the frumpy, never-married church organist Evelyn Bullard somehow added to Lucy’s moment of gratitude.
The music was the signal for the adults to file into the church. Lucy and Owen got Wyatt and his box of chickens settled in his place in line and then took a seat on the aisle as close to the front as possible. The Reverend Elsbith stood at the altar and got things rolling as quickly as she could, without so much as an opening prayer, acknowledging that there was a long line of children and animals outside the church waiting to be blessed. Still, she invited Colleen and Arlen Lowell to come up and stand with her at the front of the church, “so the children can witness what it means to be an inclusive and welcoming community.” Colleen and Arlen were clearly surprised, but pleased, and they walked to the altar together, holding hands.
Local supermom Gloria Mulligan had commandeered the Genslers’ Jewish turtle for her triplets to pull in the procession, and she’d covered a Radio Flyer wagon so densely with homemade white-tissue-paper flowers you could barely tell it was actually red. It took at least two Mulligan boys to pull the fifty-pound reptile, so whichever one was left out walked alongside for a few steps and then slugged his nearest brother and took his turn pulling the wagon. Then came a line of sweet girls wearing white dresses and holding cats, and a redhead who was carrying a birdcage with two chattering parakeets. Terrence Long was next, wearing a white tuxedo and carrying a glass bowl housing what was surely the only surviving member of last year’s second-grade nature-studies unit on crayfish. Tobias Bang shuffled along behind Terrence, palpably bored, carrying a nearly dead garter snake he’d found in his backyard four days earlier and stuck in a thirty-two-ounce mason jar just for this occasion. Then came the four-year-old dick with the guinea pig, which was out of its cage, tucked under the dick kid’s arm like a furry football.
When Wyatt appeared at the end of the aisle, holding the rope, pulling his chickens behind him, Lucy found herself not merely teary, but on the brink of weeping. She took Owen’s hand and squeezed it. Wyatt was walking on his tiptoes, with his eyes on the ground, completely focused on the task. The chickens weren’t popping their heads out of the holes in the box as planned, but still, Wyatt was participating. Just like a normal kid, Lucy thought. Exactly like all the other kids.
Brannon Anderson was trailing along several feet behind Wyatt with his family’s large yet gentle Italian Spinone hound by his side. Then came the three Howard kids, each with a baby Nubian goat that Susan had wrangled, not without difficulty, from Beekman’s famous local goat-cheese lady/part-time chanteuse. Then came Rocco Allen, Gordon Allen’s kid, with a large Doberman on one of those retractable leashes. A few more kids with dogs were clustered in the back of the church, waiting their turn, and Claire and Blake and the llama were tucked in the vestibule, clearly meant to be the big finish.
Wyatt had made it about halfway up the aisle when Cacciatore popped her head out of one of the holes and started to cluck. Cacciatore was a buff Polish chicken, and the elaborate feathers sticking out of the top of her head made her look like Kate Middleton at Ascot. Cacciatore clucked some more, and Wyatt looked back at his wheelie-cardboard-box contraption and smiled; the chicken-head holes worked! Wyatt stopped walking altogether, and Charlotte Howard’s baby goat butted its head into the cardboard box and bleated while the rest of the procession came to a temporary halt.