“Good for you,” Anna Rose said. “When you get married, are you going to have a pink wedding?”
“Good Lord, no!” Jorja gasped. “How about you?” Marriage was for other people—women who didn’t flinch every time they thought of going to bed with a man.
“If I ever take that step—and that’s a real bigif—I will have a black-and-white wedding. That means my groom will wear black jeans, and I will wear a white dress, but nothing froufrou. We’ll get married at the courthouse,” Anna Rose answered. “What color will you have?”
“Navy blue and cream,” Jorja replied even though she doubted that she would ever have to plan a wedding for herself. “I shouldn’twear white ...” She paused. “Butif—and that’s a big, enormousif—I do want a nice wedding. I will have memories. It won’t be anything huge like this, but something with pictures so if I get dementia like my grandma on my daddy’s side of the family did, I’ll have them.”
“Today’s etiquette gurus say that it’s perfectly okay to wear white even at a fifth or sixth or tenth wedding,” Anna Rose told her. “How about you, Taryn? What kind of wedding do you want?”
“I’m having a cruise wedding,” Taryn said without hesitation. “Maybe one to Alaska—and you are both invited but only if you can get along for seven days.”
“That leaves me out,” Anna Rose said.
“Me too,” Jorja added.
Clinton picked up the empty baby carrier. “Oh, come on, girls. By the time Taryn gets married, all of you will be best friends, and you’ll have a great time on the cruise.”
Anna Rose snapped her fingers close to Clinton’s face. “Wake up, soldier! You are dreaming.”
Jorja could see Taryn having a cruise wedding, but up until they’d all come home to Shamrock, she’d never thought about her cousin asking her or Anna Rose to be in the wedding party.
“You were thinking about that cruise wedding, weren’t you, Taryn?” Anna Rose asked. “Did your groom have a face?”
“You’ll never know, since you won’t be there,” Taryn answered. “And neither will Jorja.”
Yep, I was right,Jorja thought.
“You can plan it during the school year, and then Jorja can’t go anyway,” Anna Rose suggested. “My job doesn’t tie me down, and I could take all kinds of gorgeous pictures for an Alaska book while we were at sea. Who knows? The cruise line might even hire me as their professional photographer on the trip.”
“Y’all left me behind once, and look what happened.” Jorja stomped her foot. “I’m going on that cruise with you.”
“It’s not even real, so why are y’all arguing about it?” Clinton asked and then opened the door into the fellowship hall.
“Because it might be real someday,” Jorja answered.
Dark clouds covered the sky, and the first big drops of rain hit the windshield of the van just as Clinton parked behind the shop that evening after they’d left the church. “I heard somewhere that rain on the day of the wedding brought good luck to the marriage,” he said.
“If the cotton and watermelon farmers around these parts find out about that, they might be willing to finance a wedding once a week,” Taryn said as she slid the side door of the van open. The idea of a cruise wedding had stuck in her head. She’d only been joking at the time, but after thinking about it, the idea didn’t seem so far-fetched. A vision of Clinton waiting at the front of a ship’s small chapel popped into her head. In her scenario, he wore a white shirt and khaki shorts, and she had chosen a simple white cotton dress. White baby rosebuds were tucked into her hair, and they were both barefoot.
The vision vanished when Zoe reached out her little arms for Taryn to take her out of the car seat.
Anna Rose looked up at the dark clouds. “Looks like we’ve got a toad strangler on the way.”
Clinton got out of the van and reached to take the baby from Taryn. “Yep, and Zoe and I are going to run between the raindrops and go right upstairs. We’ll see y’all in the morning.”
Jorja and Anna Rose had already made a beeline for the trailer without even looking back, but Taryn sat down in the rocking chair on the porch and watched Clinton until he and the baby were safe in his apartment. His limp seemed a little worse that night—but then, there had been a lot of lifting and walking involved in setting up the church for the wedding. Her legs and feet felt like they could use a massage or,at the very least, a long soaking bath in a nice claw-foot tub. Neither of which was going to happen that evening. The tub in the trailer’s bathroom was so shallow that when she sank down into it, her boobs still floated like two balloons, and the nearest place for a good massage was probably in Amarillo.
A streak of lightning lit up the sky in a long zigzag show, and thunder followed soon after. Then the rain got serious, falling in sheets so thick that she could barely even see a flicker of the light shining through Clinton’s apartment window.
Anna Rose brought out a kitchen chair and sat down on it, and together, they watched the rain for a while. “I love the smell of rain after a hot day.”
“Me too, and I don’t even mind the storm. Like that song that Miranda Lambert sings,” Taryn said.
“That would be ‘Storms Never Last.’ I like the line that talks about bad times passing with the wind. Too bad that can’t be our story. This wind could carry away the bad times that we’ve all three had to experience, especially the ones that Jorja went through.”
The porch light came on so suddenly that Taryn closed her eyes and shivered. A memory of that last evening when she switched off the porch light behind Mitchell as he left her apartment.
“I’m facing my fears,” Jorja said as she dragged a chair out onto the porch, “and I was thinking of an old country song ...”
