The Cider Barn

They were married on the last Saturday of September, in the barn, with the tanks pushed back against the north wall and two hundred chairs on the concrete and the doors open onto the rows.

It was a double wedding, because Faye had said, once, that she would not survive two, and because Julian Reyes had pointed out that a man who has waited a year and a half has waited long enough. Sylvie was married first, in cream, with Tessa and Petra behind her and Roxy, hugely pregnant and unrepentant, holding her bouquet at the wrong angle and crying without dignity. Then Hollis, in her mother's dress let out twice, walked the length of the barn on Gil's arm while Gil said, under his breath, at every third step, "You do not have to do this. Say the word and we will drive to Poughkeepsie and be in Canada by dinner."

"I know."

"You are certain."

"I am certain."

"Then I am out of a labourer and the Spy block is doomed."

She was married at a quarter past four. Dex Cray stood at the back with a glass in his hand and a face that had been arranged into an expression of sincerity, and Roman, who had seen him come in, crossed the barn at the reception and spoke to him for two minutes in a voice nobody could hear, and Dex Cray left at seven and never came to the orchard again. Camille Reyes came, and was charming to everyone, and brought a gift of glassware which she carried into the barn herself in two boxes and set down on the press without a word about it. Constance Wray did not come. She wrote a letter of four pages to her nephew; he put it away and never mentioned it to anybody. In the third year Hollis asked him what was in it, and he said, "She wanted to know whether you had been told about the money," and that was all he would say.

Nina Duval made a speech. Ray Duval made a worse one, about shipping containers. Preston Pell, who had come after all and who had brought his wife, made the longest one, and Corinne sat through it with her hands folded and her face entirely calm, and afterwards she and Hollis stood by the press and drank cider out of paper cups.

"Well," said Corinne.

"Well."

"I was right about the door."

"You were right about the door."

They danced on the concrete until eleven, and Roxy's husband got drunk and sang, and Gil danced with Faye for the first time in eleven years, and Petra played the keyboard in the corner with a borrowed amp, badly and joyfully, with her chin down, and by Monday the valley had decided that the Ardens had done very well for themselves, which was the version Faye repeated for eleven years, in the same words every time and with the same pride in them. Hollis heard it from the woman at the egg stall on the Tuesday and did not mind it, because she had been in the barn.

Hollis and Roman left at midnight in a car with ribbons on it and drove to the city, and at four in the morning, in a hotel room with the windows open on Seventh Avenue, he said, "What are you thinking."

"I am thinking about the tank gauge."

"You are not."

"I am thinking," she said, "that I walked three miles in the rain to a house where you were sitting in a chair by a window, and that I told my sister the story of what you said about me as a joke, and that I have told it as a joke a hundred times, and that I would like to tell it once more."

"Tell it."

So she told it, sitting up in bed in a hotel room on Seventh Avenue at four in the morning, and he put his face in his hands and said, "I have spent eighteen months wishing I had said nothing, and you have spent eighteen months being glad that I said it."

"I have been extremely glad."

"Say it again."

She said it again.