Pastor Quimby looked at her for a long moment.
“I’m old,” she said. “I’m not deaf.”
“I’m trying to help. The casino is past the gas station.”
“I heard you the first time. I’m here to marry my niece and her teacher.”
“There is no wedding here,” Candace replied. “There’s been a mix-up. It’s being cleaned up.”
“I see somebody making a mess, all right.”
Candace’s face hardened. “Excuse me?”
The pastor stepped around her and lowered herself into the nearest chair. Quentin had placed it near the intended aisle before Candace moved the table into the way. A younger man reached for it.
“Ma’am,” he said, “we need that chair.”
“So do I. My knees vote first.”
“It’s an association chair.”
“Then the association can write my knees a letter.”
Lorna, standing by the coolers, covered a smile with her hand. Candace did not.
“Let her sit,” Candace said. “She’ll get tired.”
“I sat through a three-hour revival in August with no fan,” the pastor answered. “Bring your best.”
That was the first moment some of the wedding guests relaxed. Not because the conflict had ended, but because an elder had planted herself in the middle of it and demonstrated that fear need not occupy every available seat.
The bus driver opened the luggage compartment. Guests carried in coolers and cardboard boxes and gift bags. They moved around Candace’s furniture without touching it. An aunt with an arthritic wrist asked where to place the lemonade. Two teenagers carried a tower of paper plates. Nobody shouted. Their restraint made Candace more irritated, not less. Her entire method depended on the other side supplying anger she could display as proof of trouble.
She returned to the pastor.
“How do you know these people?”
“Forty years,” Pastor Quimby replied. “How do you know this lake?”
“I live above it.”
“My family was coming here before your house was built. Sometimes we came on a bus then, too.”
Candace looked toward the hill. “Your people make a habit of arriving in groups.”
The pastor leaned forward. “Weddings do that, honey. So do funerals. You’re lucky today’s a wedding.”
Behind her, Lillian Hartwell began unfolding tablecloths. She was gentle by habit, but she had raised Rowan through public school closures and neighborhood changes, and she was not impressed by the kind of wealth that thought it could reserve the meaning of a shoreline.
“Should we move the flowers out of the wind?” she asked the pastor.
“Not yet. Put them where the bride can see them. This is still her day.”
Candace looked around at the people who refused to leave. She could not keep track of their relationships. A mother, a groom, an aunt, a cousin, a friend who carried chairs, a father whose photograph stood by the aisle. They were no longer an anonymous collection of visitors. That made them harder to dismiss, so she worked harder to dismiss them.
“We’ll see what the police say,” she warned.
Pastor Quimby lifted her chin. “The police can come to the wedding too, if they’re invited.”
Bethany heard the line from the bus door and had to press her lips together to keep from laughing. On the very worst afternoons, her aunt could make a room habitable with one sentence.
The laughter was brief. Candace had taken out a roll of tape.
Chapter 11: A Sign That Wasn’t There Before
By two o’clock, the little strip of grass between the parking area and the pavilion looked like a border between two countries.
The wedding guests occupied one side with flowers and coolers. Candace’s acquaintances occupied the other with picnic containers and a table of drinks. At the center stood the aisle Bethany intended to walk down. Candace placed a plastic folding table across it as if a piece of furniture could settle a question of public property.
