Seven Months Later
Doug nodded at my wife across the VFW. “A hundred bucks if you can get her to give me Monday off.”
I laughed, racking up the billiard balls. “That is between you and your boss.”
“Come on, man. I’ve got a hot date.”
I paused to look at him over my shoulder. “She’s seen the pictures of you and she’s still coming?”
Brian laughed.
Liz looked up from behind the bar and smiled at the sound, and Brian grinned back at her.
Doug worked part-time at the clinic. He got his EMT certificate and was the Royaume-Wakan clinic designated ambulance driver. It was an extremely part-time job that consisted mostly of making sure the rig was stocked with supplies and gas, and then driving someone to the hospital in Rochester, should the situation require it. They had inventory Monday.
Brian nodded at him. “Take her to work. Show her the ambulance. It’ll make you look cool.”
“Alexis won’t let me. And this fucker won’t get me the day off. Man, I wingmanned both of you idiots and this is the thanks I get?”
I looked at my watch. “If by wingmanning you mean you made us both look good in comparison, yes, you wingmanned us.”
Brian snorted.
Doug took a swallow of his Fanta. “I don’t even want to think about the shitty dick pics that’d be floating around if it wasn’t for me. You owe your entire marriage to my expertise. You know what? Fuck you. And don’t ask me to watch your dumb dog again. I’m not doing it.”
I laughed.
Alexis finished up talking to Doreen over by the jukebox and started making her way across the bar to me. I smiled as I watched her coming.
We hadn’t told anyone yet. She wanted to wait until she was twelve weeks along first. It was way too early to notice the bump, and she was wearing my camo hoodie so you wouldn’t have seen it even if you could. But it made me grin ear to ear knowing what I knew, and that made her grin ear to ear too.
We’d already decided that our kids would be Montgomery Grants. That way they could pick whatever legacy they wanted.
It was almost a year from the day that I first laid eyes on my wife. A beautiful woman in a fancy car, nose first in a ditch, talking to me through a one-inch crack in the window.
My life was so different now. I couldn’t have ever imagined how that chance encounter could lead to all this. How happy I’d be because of that damn raccoon.
We’d had the wedding three months after the gala. Alexis wanted to get married before the construction of the clinic was complete and she’d be too busy to leave for our honeymoon. The whole town shut down for it.
I’d made our wedding rings from the wood of the banister in the house. I etched them to match and waterproofed them. I thought maybe Alexis
would want a diamond, and I could have sprung for one with how well my business was doing, but she loved the idea of me making the rings.
We got married at Doug’s barn. Jane’s catered, and Alexis ordered me a groom’s cake from Nadia Cakes that looked like a raccoon to commemorate how we met.
Alexis’s brother and his famous wife came, so we had to get three hundred and fifty NDAs signed.
I really liked Derek and Nikki. They flew in from Cambodia and stayed with us at the house for two weeks.
Alexis’s dad didn’t come to the wedding.
We knew he wouldn’t. But her mom did, and we both appreciated that she had made the effort. We knew it wasn’t easy for her to go against her husband. But she wasn’t willing to lose her kids because of him. Alexis said her mom had been to therapy too, which my wife was really happy about.
Dr. Jennifer Montgomery was a nice woman. And I think she liked her daughter-in-law, Nikki, too. They had quite a bit in common, being the philanthropists that they are.
Alexis’s mom stayed with us for a week. And when she left, she gifted us with a month-long honeymoon. It was a thoughtful present on many levels. But mostly because it was meant for me. Alexis told her mom I’d never been anywhere. So she sent us to Italy, Paris, Greece, London, and Ireland. It was all first-class and five-star hotels. A trip of a lifetime. We’d had a blast.
Alexis always gave me the window seat on the plane, since I’d never flown before. We ate at some of the best restaurants in the world. I’d learned which fork to use and I mastered Uber and those key card thingies that open hotel room doors. We saw ancient ruins and castles and spent days
on white sand beaches. I came back even more in love with my wife than I was when we left, which was hard to imagine.
We were happy to be home though—and so was Doug, because he’d watched Hunter while we were away, and our stupid dog kept bringing live rodents into the house.
Alexis closed the distance between us, and I slipped a hand around her waist. “Ready to go?” I asked.
“Yeah. I’m feeling a little ick,” she said quietly.
“Okay.” I looked up at the guys. “Hey, we’re heading out.” “See ya,” Brian said, still smiling at his girlfriend.
Doug nodded at my wife. “So when’s Briana coming down again? She still single?” He bounced his eyebrows.
Alexis laughed. “Doug, if she knew where you lived, she’d burn your house down.”
“What?” He looked back and forth between us. “She was totally into me!”
Everyone started cracking up.
Doug had followed Briana around with his guitar at our wedding. She’d found a spray bottle full of water and used it for the rest of the night to squirt him when he got too close. At least Nikki showed him how to tune the guitar while she was here…
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, still chuckling. I took my jacket off the back of the barstool and put it around my wife’s shoulders and walked her out.
We pushed into the brisk April night air.
We’d walked here for the exercise, so we were walking home. I took her hand, and she hugged my arm and put her head on my shoulder.
“How you feeling?” I asked.
“I’m just tired.”
“I think you should party less.”
She laughed. “Ha. I had that vaccine clinic today. I must have done two hundred shots. And not the fun kind.”
I kissed the top of her head. “I’ll run you a bath when we get home.”
Then I’d get the fireplace going in the bedroom while she soaked. When she got out, we’d curl up in bed with a book. In the morning I’d get up before she did and make her breakfast before she went into the clinic and I went to the garage to work on my latest commission.
At lunch I’d come meet her at Jane’s or bring her something if she was too busy to take a break. Then for dinner we’d cook together, maybe watch a movie.
The house seemed so happy that we were in it. It sighed around us. And Wakan was happy too. And healthy. For the first time in the town’s history, we had a real doctor. We didn’t have to drive to Rochester. She did house calls for Pops. Alexis was able to monitor Doug’s depression meds, so he got back on them and was doing better than ever. Lily had just come in for her one-year checkup. And the clinic helped with the tourists too. They didn’t like having to drive forty-five minutes to get treatment either.
The clinic was so busy it was hard to imagine that we’d managed to not have one for the last hundred and twenty-five years. And all in exchange for us attending a few fund-raisers once in a while. A luncheon at a golf course, the gala that we’d do once a year, a private dinner now and then with big donors. I always went with her. They were fun. I got to meet Melinda Gates last month.
I always marveled at my wife. At the polished, sophisticated woman she was, explaining in articulate detail the statistics of underserved communities and the importance of their donations. And then she’d come
home with me and put on her mud boots and go to Doug’s farm and help him deliver a goat or something. I loved that she was so squarely a Montgomery and a Grant.
Kevin Bacon trotted across the street ahead of us wearing the reflective vest Doreen had made for him. “There he goes,” Alexis said.
Kevin was our official town mascot now, allowed to wander Wakan with impunity. Tourists funded his escapades by sending Doug money via the Venmo on the side of Kevin’s vest in exchange for taking pictures with our famous pig. It was Doug’s most lucrative side hustle yet. He probably could give me the hundred bucks if I got him Monday off.
We crossed the bridge and started down the moonlit bike path under the apple trees.
“Huh,” she said, hugging my arm. “What?”
“I could swear those weren’t blooming when we walked over.”
I looked up. She was right. The trees were in full bloom. I couldn’t remember either, though it seemed like something I would have noticed.
“Do you remember that night?” she asked. “When we were walking and the petals fell?”
I nodded. “Yup. The night with Liz and Jake. The night that you were going to tell me you couldn’t see me anymore.”
Even as far behind us as that was, it still made my chest get a little tight thinking about it.
“That was the night I think I realized I was in love with you,” she said.
“Well. That explains why you tried to give me fifty thousand dollars. I’ll take that now, by the way.”
She laughed.
“It was the night you gave me the heart rock,” she said, a little distantly. “The night of the spaghetti dinner, and I felt so loved and appreciated. I think I knew even then that I was supposed to be here.”
A few petals began to drift down as we walked. Like a gentle snow made of springtime.
“I was one month in and I would have given you anything. Even then,” I said, remembering how I felt. “And now I’ll always have you and I can’t even believe it’s real.”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe the universe sent a raccoon and fog to put my car in a ditch so I’d end up there hitched to the mayor.”
I gave her an amused glance. “Are you telling me that you, a woman of science, believes that God had nothing better to do than trap you in Wakan?”
She shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t. And the town gets what it needs, doesn’t it?”
“The town does get what it needs…”
She stopped walking and turned so she could wrap her arms around me. “I don’t like that you think of me leaving you when you think of that night. That night was magic to me. Most of it.”
I put her face into my hands. “We have a whole lifetime ahead of us full of magic nights. We don’t need that one.”
She smiled and I looked into her eyes and I saw everything. The rest of my life. I saw children and grandchildren and rocking chairs on the back porch of the house overlooking the river and two old people, dying on the same day because the world would never be cruel enough to make either one of us exist without the other.
The trees rustled in the wind, and petals floated down around us. They hovered in slow motion for a second time. The universe had dipped its
snow globe again, just for us.
And we stood there in the magic, knowing full well what it was.
