My thumb was still smeared with blue ink from the marriage license when the first heavy drop hit the canvas.<\/p>\n
We were standing behind the old marina in Florence, Oregon, where the salt grass meets the gravel lot. I had spent six months cutting folding tables down with a hand saw so they wouldn’t wobble on the slope. My sister Martha had driven down from Portland with thirty Mason jars filled with baby\u2019s breath that we tied to fence posts with twine.<\/p>\n
The sky over the Siuslaw River didn’t look angry at first. It just turned the color of a wet slate shingle, flat and heavy, right around four in the afternoon.<\/p>\n
“It’ll blow over,” Arthur said. He adjusted his collar, his fingers catching on the boutonni\u00e8re I’d made out of dried wheat and lavender. He always said things would blow over because he believed the world was generally polite if you gave it enough time.<\/p>\n
Then the wind came off the bar.<\/p>\n
It didn’t rain so much as it fell in sheets, sideways and cold, smelling of diesel and old kelp. The white tulle of my skirt grabbed the wind like a sail, and before Arthur could catch my elbow, the canopy frame groaned twice and folded itself neatly into the blackberry brambles.<\/p>\n
Martha dropped her bucket of programs into the mud.<\/p>\n
Nobody screamed, which somehow felt worse. We just stood there while forty chairs turned into little white rafts floating toward the salt marshes. The minister, an old retired Methodist named Brother Vance who had married half the county, took off his glasses, wiped them on his damp trousers, and looked at me with an expression that made me want to crawl under the nearest timber dock.<\/p>\n
“Well, Clara,” he said, his voice small against the roar of the water. “The Lord’s testing the glue today.”<\/p>\n
That was when Arthur did the thing that stayed with me through every single bill and argument we’d have over the next ten years. He didn’t swear or kick a crate. He reached out, grabbed my bare shoulders through the soaking lace, and pulled me right against his chest where his wool vest was still dry underneath.<\/p>\n
“I love you,” he told my ear. “I don’t care about the weather.”<\/p>\n
The next twenty minutes were a blur of wet cardboard and ruined ribbon. We ended up huddling underneath the overhang of the bait house next to the public scale, the place where the charter boats weighed out their salmon in July. It smelled intensely of dead herring and old diesel.<\/p>\n
A kid with a Nikon who had been sitting in his truck waiting out the squall climbed out with his hood pulled tight over his brow. He didn’t ask if he could take pictures. He just stood twenty feet away in the sleet, his long lens catching the way my veil was plastered across Arthur\u2019s cheek like a spiderweb.<\/p>\n
“Stay right there,” the kid shouted over the wind. “Don’t look at me.”<\/p>\n
We got married with two deckhands from the cannery as witnesses. They were smoking menthol cigarettes behind a stack of green plastic crates and only came over when Brother Vance dropped his Bible in a puddle. One of them, a man with a missing tooth named Ray, held an umbrella made of an old feed sack over the register while Arthur slid the plain silver band onto my finger. It wouldn’t go past my knuckle at first because my hands were swollen from the cold.<\/p>\n
“There,” Ray muttered, spitting a bit of tobacco into the gravel. “Now you’re stuck.”<\/p>\n
We ate cold ham sandwiches out of a cooler in the back of Arthur\u2019s pickup while the heater blew lukewarm air that smelled like old antifreeze. My hair was stiff with salt and river mud. I had a bruise on my shin where the folding table had kicked back when the wind took it.<\/p>\n
We didn’t know about the kid with the camera until Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n
Arthur was out in the garage trying to dry the canvas canopy with a box fan when my phone started vibrating against the kitchen counter. It didn’t stop for three hours. By noon, my sister Martha was on the line, screaming so loud I had to pull the receiver away from my ear.<\/p>\n
“Clara, look at the local news page right now,” she yelled. “You’re on the front page of the Oregonian.”<\/p>\n
The photo wasn’t the posed portrait we had paid fifty dollars for. It was the one the kid took by the bait scales. Arthur was holding my chin with one thumb, his knuckles red and raw from the wind, and I was laughing so hard my eyes were squeezed shut while the rain ran off the tip of my nose.<\/p>\n
By Thursday, the clip had crossed over to some national morning show. People were sending us messages from places like Ohio and
\nNorth Carolina about how real love didn’t need a dry floor.<\/p>\n
Then came the letter on creamy linen paper with a corporate logo in the corner.<\/p>\n
A major cruise line based out of Seattle had seen the broadcast while their marketing director was sitting in a hotel room in Tacoma. They wanted to make it up to us, they said. A ten-day trip down the coast to Cabo San Lucas, complete with a proper wedding arch on the sun deck and a photographer who didn’t charge by the hour.<\/p>\n
“We aren’t cruise people, Arthur,” I said, turning the gold-embossed invitation over in my hands while the coffee pot sputtered on the stove. We had spent our savings on those thirty Mason jars and the rental fee for the marina lot, and the idea of standing on a ship full of strangers in evening wear made my stomach turn over.<\/p>\n
“We aren’t anything yet,” Arthur said. He was sitting at the kitchen table cleaning his fish-cleaning knife with an oily rag. “We’re just wet.”<\/p>\n
We went, of course. Everybody goes when someone else offers to pay for the steak.<\/p>\n
The ship was enormous, white as a wedding cake, and smelled faintly of chlorine and lime wedge. They put us in a suite on the seventh deck with a balcony big enough to hold a small car. The staff treated us like royalty, bringing us mimosas in crystal flutes before we even cleared the jetty at Astoria.<\/p>\n
On the third night out, somewhere off the coast of Mendocino where the Pacific gets that deep, ink-black look, we stood on the back deck watching the wake churn white in the dark. The air was warm enough that I didn’t need a cardigan.<\/p>\n
Arthur leaned his elbows on the brass railing and looked out at the horizon where the stars were getting swallowed by a bank of low fog.<\/p>\n
“You miss the rain?” he asked.<\/p>\n
I looked down at my hand. The simple silver band was still there, scratched up from the truck engine and the toolboxes, sitting right next to the heavy diamond the cruise line had given us for the publicity shots. The diamond was bright and sharp, but it didn’t catch the light the way the silver did in the gray drizzle behind the bait house.<\/p>\n
“I think,” I said, watching the white water boil up behind the screws, “I think we would have stayed dry if we’d planned it better.”<\/p>\n
Arthur turned his head and looked at me sideways, the way he did when he was trying to figure out if I was joking or about to start an argument. He didn’t say anything for a long time. The ship\u2019s horn gave a low, deep blast that rattled the glass in the doors behind us, calling everyone in for the midnight buffet.<\/p>\n
“Maybe,” he said softly, his hand finding mine in the dark. “Or maybe we would have had a very nice afternoon and forgotten all about it by next Tuesday.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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