Chapter 266 I'll Show Up

Chapter 266 I'll Show Up
ETHAN'S POV

The whole house was breathing when I came downstairs — ninety-one chairs already stood on my parents' grass before seven in the morning, and my mother had been out there twice, hand up at the sky, checking. It hadn't rained on that lawn in nine days. She'd said so eleven times this week, and she still didn't believe it.
My suit hung on the closet door. My shoes waited under it. The ring box sat on the dresser where I'd left it at midnight, and I'd been awake since about five.
The knock came at half past seven. Kowalski's been my best man since he asked for the job outside a rink two summers ago and got a yes before he even finished the sentence.
"You awake?"
"Unfortunately."
He took one look at me. "You look terrified."
"I'm getting married."
"Exactly," he said.
The room filled up over the next hour with men who have no business near a tie. Somebody botched my cufflinks twice. Somebody else told the same joke about the market four times and liked it more with every go.
My hand kept drifting to my own finger. There was nothing on it yet.
It wasn't nerves about Ares. That man was always going to be standing on that grass. It was the size of it.
Five years ago the two of us drove to the same building in separate cars. This morning there were ninety-one chairs on a lawn with a shed at the end of it.
His mother arrived before anybody else. Her dress was already on, her shoes in her hand as she crossed the grass, and she put both arms around me in my parents' kitchen and said one thing into my shoulder.
"Take care of my son."
"I will."
His father came with Renata, out of one suit and into another. No staff trailing him, nobody waiting outside in a car. He shook my hand, then pulled me in with one arm.
"Welcome to the family."
"I've been in it a while."
"Fair," he said.
My family arrived together and the noise in that yard doubled in a minute flat. April had Rosa by the hand, in something my mother's going to talk about for a year. She's four, and she has opinions about chairs.
Asher told her twice not to run. She ran.
April caught my eye from four rows off and mouthed something I'm not writing down.
Then Asher came over and stood beside her.
"Are you crying."
"No."
"You absolutely are," April said.
"I'm not."
"He is," I said, and got a look from both of them.
Harlan came with four Ridgewood men and stood in my mother's yard in a jacket nobody had ever seen on him. Two of my teammates were already arguing with two of Ares's about a call from March. Those two rooms were never supposed to share that grass. Nobody out there seemed to notice, and that's the part I'm keeping.
Harlan got an arm around my shoulders and told me what he thought of the man I'd turned into, then let go fast, because he's Harlan.
"Ready?"
"More than I expected to be."
Then the music started, and all ninety-one chairs turned.
Ares walked down that grass with his mother on his arm.
He'd asked her in a diner eleven miles from her house. On his own, with me sitting in a lot four hundred yards off, radio on, engine running. He was in there fifty minutes. He came out, sat down in that car, and stayed quiet until we were on the highway.
She said yes inside four seconds. He took fifty minutes to ask.
She walked him the whole way with her chin up and her eyes going, and she never once wiped her face. At the end of it she put his hand in mine. Nobody had asked her to do that, and nobody had rehearsed it. Then she sat down in the front row, beside a man she hadn't spoken to in eleven years.
His grandmother's watch was on his wrist, still going.
"You holding up."
"Ask me after the vows," I said.
Mine got said looking at him, not the officiant.
"I can't promise nothing will hurt us. I've watched what happens to people in this family and I'm not standing here lying to you in front of your mother."
He looked away, just for a second, then came back.
"I can't promise I'll know what to say. I get it wrong. I got it wrong for a year and you waited anyway."
His eyes had gone by then, and he let them.
"But here's the one I can do," I said. "I'll show up. On the good ones. On the bad ones. When we're winning and when we're getting beaten. When it's enormous and when it's an ordinary evening with nothing on."
I had both his hands in mine.
"That's the entire vow. I'll show up."
He took a second before he started.
"For years I kept a way out," Ares said. "Somewhere to go. Somebody to fall back on if the rest of it went."
The yard went completely silent. Even Rosa.
"Then you happened, and you were never the fallback." He got the first part out level, and not the next. "You turned into the place I go."
"So there's no plan behind you any more. There hasn't been one since I was twenty-three."
He held my hand in both of his.
"I choose you. That's the whole of mine as well."
The ring went on him with a hand that wouldn't behave. He noticed. He didn't say anything about it until much later.
He put mine on and kept hold of it after.
The officiant gave us four seconds before he said a word, and that was the right call.
Then Rosa Kane addressed the whole yard from where she sat, at full volume.
"Can they kiss now?"
That yard came apart. April had both hands over her face. Asher didn't even try. Harlan made a sound that man hadn't made in six years.
So we did — in front of ninety-one people on my parents' grass, with the shed in every single photograph.
The reception was in the yard, and half of it ended up in the kitchen anyway. His mother gave a short toast and made it about two-thirds through. His father gave one after her, with nothing in it about anything except his son.
Harlan raised a glass and said it was time the two of us stopped competing.
"Absolutely not," Ares said.
Rosa had April up dancing, then Asher, then both of us. She rode my hip for one turn and Ares's for the next, telling him at length about the chairs.
She was asleep on Asher's shoulder by half past nine, one shoe off.
Around ten we slipped out to the side of the house, where the music only came through a wall.
"Married."
"Married."
"It still sounds odd."
"Good odd?"
"The best kind," Ares said, and put his forehead on mine.
Then I looked past his shoulder, through my mother's kitchen window, and the noise in there had stopped.
His mother stood at that counter with a cup in her hand. His father stood on the other side of it, his back to the sink. The two of them were talking, and neither one seemed to be looking for a way out of that room.
Twenty-six years, and those two have managed without doing that.
I've heard about a courtroom. About a house in another state. About a Christmas when he was nine. Nobody has ever told me a story with the two of them in a kitchen.
I got both hands on his shoulders and turned him to face the glass.