Meg looked at him. He had hot sauce on his chin and his good button-down had rolled back to wrinkled. He looked nothing like a groom in a brochure. He looked like Luke.
She closed the phone.
“What do you actually want?” she asked. “Not ‘whatever makes you happy.’ Not ‘it’s your day.’ What doyouwant?”
Luke set his taco down. Wiped his chin with a napkin—a paper one, no crane, no fold, just a napkin—and looked at her.
“Sand,” he said. “Under my feet. The ocean behind us. You in front of me. Our family around us.” He picked up his taco again. “That’s it. That’s the whole list.”
“That’s not a venue.”
“It’s every beach in California.”
“You can’t have a wedding on just any beach. There are permits. And chairs—where do people sit? Margo can’t stand on sand for an hour. And food, and music, and?— “
“Meg.”
“— and an officiant, and a sunset that cooperates, and what if it’s windy? Sand in everything. Sand in the cake. Sand in Margo’s?—”
“Meg.”
She stopped. A seagull landed on the railing and eyed her fish taco.
“Beach,” Luke said. “You, me, the family. Chairs for Margo. Someone to say the words. The ocean being the ocean.” He reached across the picnic table and took the phone off the surface and put it in her bag. “That’s a wedding. Everything else is decoration.”
“Decoration matters.”
“Not as much as you think.”
Meg looked at the harbor. Boats rocking gently. Sun going lower. The kind of light that made everything look warmer than it was.
“A beach wedding,” she said.
“A beach wedding.”
“People will have sand in their shoes.”
“People will survive.”
“What about food?”
“We can find food. Lots of caterers.
“The seagull made a move for the taco basket. Luke waved it off without looking. Practiced. The man had spent twenty years near water. Seagulls were a solved problem.
Meg ate her last taco and thought about it. A beach. Chairs. Their family. The ocean. No courtyard, no fountain, no ballroom that smelled like carpet cleaner. Just sand and the people they loved and whatever food they could manage.
It was either the simplest idea in the world or the most terrifying.
“I don’t know how to plan simple,” she said.
“I know.”
“I plan complicated. Complicated is what I’m good at.
“You’ll find things to organize.” Luke smiled. “Trust me. You’ll have a spreadsheet for the sand.”
“You’re not funny.”
