Julia Spencer-Fleming - One Was a Soldier

“We saved you seats.” He stepped into the aisle to let her and the children pass, and Hadley could see Harlene and her husband holding down the other end.

“Thanks,” she said. “I didn’t think we’d ever get out of the house.” She looked him up and down. “Nice suit.” She’d never seen him dressed up before. Kind of a shame, because he had the perfect build for it, long legs, wide shoulders, slim hips.

“Well, Genny Knox, aren’t you just the prettiest girl here?” Harlene patted the pew next to her. “You slide on over and sit with me.” Hadley followed her daughter, directing Hudson to the seat between herself and Flynn. She had discovered it was better to bracket them with adults during church services. Two to one was a good ratio.

“Did we miss anything?” Hadley asked, but before anyone could answer, the door by the sacristy opened and the priest came out, followed by the chief and Lyle MacAuley. The organ music stopped. A hush settled over the congregation.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen the dep looking nervous before,” Hadley whispered.

“Hmph.” The dispatcher spoke over Genny’s head. “Probably waitin’ to disappear into a puff of smoke and brimstone, being inside a church.”

Flynn grinned.

The organ sang out, something loud and complicated, with lots of notes running up and down the scale. People started to stand up. At the back of the church, two men pulled the doors open. Flynn checked his watch. “I think this is it.”

“I can’t see! Mommy, I can’t see!” Genny hopped up and down in frustration.

“Come here, Genny, stand in front of me.” Flynn stepped back and let Geneva squeeze past him. She hung off the pew ends, leaning as far into the aisle as she could. Hudson twisted back and forth around Flynn, clearly wanting a better view, clearly unwilling to admit it. Flynn took him by the shoulders and maneuvered him into the space next to his sister.

Flynn turned to grin at Hadley, and she smiled ruefully back at him, and there was a moment-it must have been the soaring music or the dizzying smell of the flowers-when her smile ghosted away and she felt like she had a lump in her throat.

Then Reverend Clare’s matron of honor walked past and Genny squealed and Hadley snapped her attention back to the aisle. “Oh, Mommy.” Genny sounded close to swooning. “Reverend Clare looks like a princess .” In truth, Reverend Clare’s Christmas and Easter vestments were a lot more elaborate than her unadorned wedding dress. Her wreath of tiny cream and gold flowers was a little crownlike, though, and she did have a train, which upped the princess quotient. As she and her father walked past, Clare grinned and winked at Geneva. The little girl quivered with ecstasy. “And so it starts,” Hadley said under her breath. She could foresee a lot of dress-up games involving tablecloth trains and half-slip veils in her future.

“Dearly beloved,” Reverend Julie McPartlin began, “we have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony.”

Hadley thought of her own wedding. Las Vegas, during an industry convention. What a cliché. When Dylan asked her, his eyes dark and soulful and a heartbreaker smile on his lips, it had seemed reckless and romantic.

“… therefore, marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately…”

She hadn’t even been sober. They had smoked two joints beforehand and giggled through the whole thing. What did it say about your approach to marriage when you treated the start of it as an ironic joke?

“Into this holy union Russell Howard Van Alstyne and Clare Peyton Fergusson now come to be joined.”

Beside her, Harlene honked into a tissue. Hadley watched as she reached out and grabbed her husband’s hand. Mr. Lendrum was sixty-something and built as if he’d been stitched out of lumpy cotton batting, but Harlene looked at him, for a moment, in exactly the same way Clare Fergusson was looking at Russ Van Alstyne.

Was there some sort of secret everybody but Hadley knew? Or was it that some women had a clear-eyed view of the good guys, while all she had ever been able to see was users and bastards?

Then came the readings and the homily and the prayers and communion and finally it was almost over, thank heavens, because the kids were getting twitchy. The priest delivered a final prayer over the kneeling couple. “Is the chief going to become Episcopalian?” Hadley whispered to Flynn.

“I think he’s going to stay Law-Enforcementarian,” he said under his breath. She snickered.

The choir stood and the organ started up, a soft, rhythmic beat that sounded almost like the beginning of a sixties tune. “Ooo! I know this,” Hudson said. “We’re doing this with the adult choir at Christmas.”

“Tomorrow will be my dancing day,” the choir sang, and Reverend Clare and the chief walked back down the aisle, both of them looking as if they’d been lit up from inside. The music and voices soared, sharp and sweet. On every side of her, people’s eyes were wet, and Harlene was honking, and Flynn turned to Hadley and smiled.

Weddings. It was like they put some sort of drug in with the flower arrangements.

“Do you think it’ll last?” Hadley said, determined to break the spell.

Flynn looked at her as if she had asked if he thought the sun would rise in the east tomorrow. “Are you kidding?” He leaned in so his breath was warm in her ear. “It’s true love.”

“There’s no such thing.”

He thumbed toward Hudson. “Tell him that.”

Her son was looking up at the choir, his hand keeping the irregular beat. “To call my true love to my dance,” he sang in his piping soprano, “Sing O! my love, O! my love, my love, my love; This I have done for my true love.”

Flynn smiled at her. “Let’s go dance.”

The reception was a blast, despite-or maybe because of-the rich Virginians and the priests. There were other kids there, nieces and nephews and the children of friends, so after they had bolted down some dinner, Hadley let Hudson and Genny join the others playing flashlight tag in the field next to the tents.

The chief and Reverend Clare kicked off the dancing to the old Beach Boys tune “God Only Knows,” and soon the floor was packed with everyone from Mrs. Marshall and Norm Madsen, sedately fox-trotting, to the youngest Ellis boy, popping and locking. Hadley danced with Nathan Andernach, the perpetual bachelor of St. Alban’s, and with Nathan Bougeron, who had left the MKPD before she arrived for a job with the state police, and with a good-looking guy from Maryland who turned out to be a priest, which kind of freaked her out. She danced with Lyle MacAuley, and with Noble Entwhistle, and with Duane Adams, one of the part-time officers.

She didn’t dance with Kevin Flynn. She had thought about it, driving over to the Stuyvesant Inn, and realized all those throat-closing, eyes-meeting moments were based on the fact that he was the only unattached guy remotely her age she saw on a regular basis. But, hey, at a wedding reception? Lots of possibilities. So she smiled at men she didn’t know and said yes to anyone who asked her, and stayed away from Flynn.

After the cake cutting, Granddad announced he was taking Hudson and Genny home. “You stay put and have a good time,” he said, when she protested she should leave, too. “’Tain’t natural for a girl pretty as you to sit home all the time.” He winked. “I’ll leave a light on for ya.”

So she stayed. She danced and chatted and laughed. She congratulated the newlyweds. “Are you Clare Van Alstyne now?” she asked the reverend.

“No, I’m Russ Fergusson,” the chief said.