I bent my head. She slid the pin into my hair above my left ear, her fingers lingering, adjusting, making sure it was secure the way a mother checks that everything is in place before she lets go.
There.
Then, in a voice that almost cracked but did not, because she was Eunice Park:
Not yet. Mascara.
At ten-thirty, I stood at the far end of a stone path along the cliff’s edge.
A wooden arch wrapped in Oklahoma wildflowers — Indian blanket, black-eyed Susan, coneflower. The flowers I used to pick on the side of the county road when I was eight, walking home from the bus stop because nobody was coming to get me. I had wanted them because they were mine. Not Lorraine’s, not Shelby’s, not Bartlesville’s. Mine.
Eighty-five people sat in white folding chairs on a cliff above the Pacific.
James stood at the end of the path in a dark suit, no tie, his eyes already wet.
There was no one beside me.
No father. No mother.
I want you to understand the difference between walking alone because no one showed up and walking alone because you decided that the person who delivers you to the altar should be the same person who got you this far.
That person was me.
I walked alone.
The ocean moved on both sides of the cliff. The wildflowers trembled in the wind off the water. Somewhere behind me, at some point I did not consciously register, eighty-five people rose.
Not because tradition told them to.
Because something in the sight of a woman walking alone toward the person who stayed made them want to be on their feet.
James spoke first. Warm, specific, funny.
He said he had met me when I was arguing with a piece of rebar about spacing.
You were losing, he said. And I thought, I want to know this woman.
The guests laughed. Mrs. Park shook her head.
Then it was my turn.
The ocean moved behind him. The wildflowers trembled. Eighty-five people went quiet.
I opened my mouth.
And for one terrible, beautiful moment — nothing.
Everything I had ever wanted to say to anyone jammed behind my chest at once.
Then I found it. My phrase. The one I had lost in a dark apartment and found again on a balcony.
Structurally speaking, James —
My voice cracked. I stopped. Breathed.
