Part Seven: The Garden in May
They married in May, in the garden.
It was simple by design — Owen had offered otherwise, had said that if Lila wanted something larger or more formal he would happily arrange it, and she had looked at him with the expression she had when something was clear to her and said that the garden was where it had started and the garden was where it should be. He had agreed immediately, because he thought she was right and also because he knew, by then, that her instincts about what mattered were almost always better calibrated than his own.
The climbing roses were in bloom. Someone — Lila, who had been learning their names and habits all winter, the way Claire had known them — had cut the overgrown sections back in March and the plants had responded with an extravagance of new growth that covered the south wall in a way Owen had not seen in years. The day was warm and clear, the mountain air carrying its particular quality of cleanness, and the garden smelled of roses and the just-mown grass and the faint cedar of the good chairs brought out from the house.
Avery and Sadie stood at the front, because it had been non-negotiable since the moment the wedding was discussed that they would stand at the front. Avery wore the yellow dress she had selected herself and Sadie wore the blue one, and both of them had strong opinions about which flowers to carry and had communicated those opinions at length over the preceding weeks.
The ceremony was conducted by a friend, and it said the true things and skipped the decorative ones, and when it was over Owen looked at Lila in the afternoon light of the garden where it had all begun and felt something that he would not, if pressed, have been able to put into precise language — which was unusual for him, and which felt correct.
What he felt was continuity. Not replacement, not erasure, not a door closing on what had been. Something more complicated and more honest than that. The sense that life, which he had assumed was contracting, had instead turned out to be still capable of expansion. That the house, which had been full of one kind of love, was now capable of being full of a different kind, without the two being in competition. That loss does not cancel the future — it complicates it, makes it more layered, asks more of you, but it does not cancel it.
The girls threw flower petals with the joyful inaccuracy of children who have been given a task they are fully committed to.
