Mary and O'Neil Page 0,60

and finds them standing at the far window, their broad backs toward him. His eyes follow their gaze; it is Simone, once again crossing the lot to her car. O’Neil’s first thought is that he isn’t so late after all, that not all the guests have left. But then this thought is pushed aside, he sees Simone through his friends’ eyes, and he knows he is looking at a beautiful woman, maybe the most beautiful woman he has ever seen in his life, crossing the lot below them. Her steps are slow, graceful, without calculation; she seems almost to float. O’Neil is filled with a reverent awe, traveling the length of his body like a beam of light.

“Unbelievable,” Stephen says.

“They’re different from us.” Connor, his hands buried in his pockets, shakes his head in amazement. “It’s really very simple. I speak not as a married man but as a scientist.”

The three men watch while she opens the driver’s door, removes her hat, and, balanced on her slender heels, lowers herself sideways onto the driver’s seat, her legs dangling out of the car so that she can smooth the front of her dress. She pulls the door shut behind her, places the hat on the seat beside her, and arches her back to examine herself in the rearview mirror, pushing a hand through her long hair. The engine purrs to life and she backs out of the drive.

Still they do not move. The silence of the room falls over them. It is as if they have seen an apparition, a sign, as if they have dreamed the same dream together. Then his friends see that he is ready, they gather their things, and they take O’Neil to his wedding.

It is twelve-fifteen by the time they arrive at the house, and O’Neil’s sister meets him at the door. It rained a while back, she tells him, after they spoke on the phone; just a shower, but the path is too muddy to go up the hill.

“I know,” O’Neil says. “Where’s Mrs. Cavanaugh? I’ll talk to her.”

O’Neil enters the crowded house to look for the minister and finds her in the den, taking a last look at her notes for the homily. She is wearing a thick wool sweater under her vestment, and O’Neil hugs her, embarrassing both of them, because he has never hugged her before. “I think we’re going to do it under the tent,” he tells her. “If that’s okay. Plan B.”

They agree to start in about ten minutes, and O’Neil excuses himself to find Mary. But out in the living room he realizes it’s hopeless; Mary is upstairs with her friends, and he knows that if she wanted to see him she would be downstairs now. His gaze travels the packed room. Somehow, everyone seems to know that the wedding is moments away, and O’Neil realizes that, just as he had wished, all the last decisions have been made for him, that his late arrival was expected and understood, as much a part of the fabric of the day as food and vows and the problem of the weather. There is nothing more to do now, nothing to arrange. He sees a photographer gliding through the crowd, and notices for the first time that the room is filled with flowers; he hears, drifting from the lawn outside, the sound of a fiddle, playing a waltz that he and Mary chose a month before, though he does not remember choosing it, just as he does not remember hiring the photographer or ordering the flowers; none of these. Stephen hands him a glass of water, and he drinks it down in one gulp, asks for another, and drinks that down too. It is May twenty-ninth, O’Neil thinks. I am thirty years old. The woman I will marry is upstairs. These simple facts seem suddenly to hold his whole life, and he is glad for it, right down to his bones. They have saved him, though he did not know he had to be saved. And something he heard earlier in the day comes back to him: Then, you and she will be together. That’s the nicest part, I think.

His sister is beside him. “See?” she says. “It’s not so hard.”

“So this is what it’s like.”

“That’s right, hon.” Kay smiles at him and takes his arm. “This is what it’s like.”

She leads him outside. The guests have followed them out to the lawn, and O’Neil sees that chairs have been put under

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