Mabel Puit cried, which she denied afterward. Harriet Bloom did not cry, but gripped her husband's arm with an intensity that left marks. Old Walt Carson's dog, somehow present despite being no one's guest, sat at the end of a pew and behaved with improbable dignity. Clara made her own dress. Of course, she made her own dress.
It was ivory wool, simply cut, with small buttons she'd carved from bone herself over three evenings at the worktable. Nothing elaborate. She had made elaborate things for other people her whole adult life and knew exactly how much labor elaborate required and had decided that what she wanted for her wedding was a dress that fit her perfectly and moved when she moved and required no management. It fit perfectly. It moved when she moved.
Ryder wore the suit she'd made him. Not the first one, the second one. The one she'd made alone during the three days he'd been sitting on a ridge being by his own description an idiot. She had never told him when she made it. He had found out eventually, and when he did, he went quiet in the particular way that meant something had landed somewhere deep.
Standing at the front of the church beside him, she held his hand and said the words that needed saying, and he said the words that needed saying, and when it was done, he looked at her with the full open expression. No almost, no guardedness, just everything. And she looked back at him the same way. And that was that. Afterward, at the reception in the square that Mabel had organized with the tactical efficiency of a military campaign, Ryder danced with her badly and without apology.
He was not a man built for dancing, too deliberate in his movements, too accustomed to economy of motion to know what to do with motion that served no purpose except pleasure. He stepped on her foot twice, she stepped on his once deliberately to balance the accounting. He laughed, the real one, not the quiet almost version. And she thought she would keep the sound of it for the rest of her life and be right about the worth of it. The house was finished in June.
It was not large. Two rooms downstairs, two above, a kitchen lean to on the south side, a porch that ran the full front face and caught the evening light in a way that Ryder had calculated deliberately when he chose the orientation of the structure. The wood was plain and the windows were not fancy and the front door hung slightly heavier than intended because of a miscalculation in the frame that Bill Garrett said he would come back and fix and never did. So, it stayed slightly heavy and they both learned to lean into it when they came home, which eventually became so automatic they stopped noticing. On the day they moved in, or rather on the day Clara brought the last box across from the room above the shop, and set it on the kitchen table, and looked around at the walls that were theirs, the floors they had helped lay, the windows that framed the land they owned.
She stood there for a long moment and did the accounting. She had started over once before in her shop after Ethan left, and that accounting had been made in loss. Everything subtracted, what remained after. This accounting was addition, not the naive kind, not the calculation of someone who hadn't lost anything and didn't understand what loss looked like, but the measured, cleareyed counting of someone who knew exactly what things cost and had decided that these things were worth the price. One crooked worktable inherited from a man she loved.
One tailor shop still operating on the corner of Third and Main because she had not closed it and did not intend to. One husband who fixed things without being asked and said what he meant and had once sat on a ridge for three days being an idiot and come back anyway. One piece of land that had tested them through one winter and would test them through more. She added it up and it came to more than she'd had before and less than she'd expected it to feel like, which was not a complaint. It felt like life rather than story, and she had decided that life was what she wanted.