His mouth moved into an expression that wasn't a smile but lived in the same neighborhood. He nodded toward a mud-spattered pickup at the end of the lot. "Your car won't make it up the mountain. We'll take the truck."
I grabbed my briefcase from the passenger seat (the 47-page manual was inside, and I wasn't leaving it in an unattended Prius in a town I'd known for three minutes) and followed him to the pickup. He transferred my bags. My coordinated luggagesettled into the truck bed between a coil of climbing rope and a battered toolbox, which was either a metaphor for my immediate future or just interesting cargo organization.
"Jeannie at the store will keep an eye on your vehicle," he said, closing the tailgate.
"Jeannie?"
"Runs Moose's."
"And Moose?"
"Her grandfather. Dead since '98."
That was, apparently, the complete history. I climbed into the cab. It smelled like pine and rope, and underneath that, something closer — skin and soap, him, probably, soaked into the seat after years of driving this road. I buckled my seatbelt and swallowed.
He pulled out of the lot. Cedar Bluff's main road gave way to a two-lane road that gave way to ruts. The road climbed and the truck bounced hard enough that conversation was impractical and reading was impossible. I'd planned to introduce the binder during the drive. Instead I gripped the door handle while my briefcase slid across the bench seat and bumped his thigh.
"Sorry."
He glanced down at the briefcase against his leg. "It's fine."
I pulled it back. His well-muscled thigh was right there. This was going to be a very long twelve months.
We turned and stopped in front of a house still in town, tidy clapboard with a wide porch, wind chimes turning lazily in the late afternoon air. The garden was ambitious for the altitude and winning. Dahlias crowded against a border of purple wildflowers, and I liked the person who lived here before the door opened.
"Barbara Pruitt," Cliff said. "She'll marry us."
I'd known the ceremony would be today. The app's concierge service had arranged it. Knowing and standing on the porch about to walk through the door were different things.
The door opened, and the woman behind it was in her mid-sixties with hair tinted an improbable shade of plum that didn't occur in nature but suited her so completely it made you wonder why nature hadn't thought of it. Reading glasses hung on a beaded chain, and a cat-shaped brooch was pinned to the collar of a cardigan that had spent significant time in the company of an actual cat. Her lipstick was a committed red, applied with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and two different-colored socks were visible at her ankles — one teal, one mustard, both loud enough to be on purpose.
"You're on time," she said to Cliff. "That's new." She turned to me and her whole face opened into warmth I wasn't ready for. "Come in, hon. Don't let Governor out."
Governor was an enormous orange tabby sitting on the hallway table with the bearing of a creature who had never once been told no. His collar tag glinted.
"Governor the Third," Barbara told me, giving him a scratch he accepted as tribute. "The first two also attended every ceremony. It's a family commitment."
She said it to the cat as much as to me, and Governor blinked once in what I could only interpret as confirmation.
She led us into the living room. The room smelled like cinnamon and old books. A grandfather clock ticking against the far wall. The floral sofa had been pushed back, and a side table held a marriage license and two ring boxes. The room had the worn ease of a space that had held hundreds of beginnings, and something in my chest responded before I could get ahead of it.
She opened a binder of her own — smaller than mine, held together with a rubber band — and positioned herself acrossfrom us. Cliff and I stood facing her. Governor padded in and sat at Cliff's feet as if this were, in fact, his contractual obligation.
"Now," she said, looking over her reading glasses at me. "I've married eleven Mountain Mates couples. Seven are still together, which is a better record than the locals, and I will tell you that story another time because it involves a canoe."
Cliff stood close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his arm. I hadn't expected that. That a man could radiate enough to feel from three inches away, or that I would notice, or that noticing would make it harder to focus on what was happening.
"He's nervous," Barbara said, not looking up from her binder. "He does that thing with his jaw."
I glanced at Cliff. His jaw was, in fact, tight.
"I'm fine."
"I didn't say you weren't fine. I said you were nervous. Both things can be true, hon." She turned a page. "Let's begin."
Barbara had a cadence worn smooth from repetition, but she paused at certain lines the way a person does when they wrote them. "I added that part myself," she said after a flourish about geese mating for life. "The state version puts people to sleep." I watched the grandfather clock because looking at Cliff while saying the word forever seemed unwise. The ceremony took eleven minutes.
"Do you, Cliff Masterson, take this woman —"
