If You Leave

The quartet stopped playing. Nobody on that lawn moved, and Gloria kept her finger right where it was, an inch from my mother's nose.

"Look at your daughter up there with that long face, all because my son wants to help a sick friend," she said, and she turned around so both sides of the aisle could get a good look at her. "Is that what you taught her? To be a selfish, ungrateful bitch on her own wedding day?"

My mother looked down at the bag in her lap. Her fingers tightened on the clasp, but she didn't say a word. She had never once raised her voice in public in her whole life, and she wasn't going to start for Gloria Marsh.

"Typical country trash," Gloria said. "I knew it the first time I saw her. No manners, no class and no gratitude." She looked my mother up and down, from the old blue dress to the flat shoes, and her mouth twisted. "Did you even bring a gift? Or did you think your pathetic presence here was enough?"

In the fourth row, Trent's friends from the office started laughing, and one of them held up his phone to film my mother's face.

"My son is a CEO," Gloria went on. "Any woman on this lawn would marry him today." She swung around and pointed at a young woman in a yellow dress. "Her. He could point at her right now and she would walk straight down that aisle. Wouldn't you, sweetheart?"

The girl in yellow went red and giggled into her hand, and she didn't say no.

A chair scraped hard beside my mother. Nolan was on his feet, and he was taller than every man on that lawn. Gloria took half a step back before she could stop herself, and then she lifted her chin and pretended she hadn't.

"Sit down, boy. Do you know who my son is?"

My father didn't say anything. He just put his hand on Nolan's arm without even turning his head, the same thing he used to do when Nolan was sixteen and wanted to fight the whole world. Nolan's jaw worked for a moment, and then he sat back down very slowly, and he never once took his eyes off Trent.

Trent had watched all of it from the middle of the aisle. He hadn't said a word to stop his mother, and now he laughed and shook his head at me.

"See, Delia? This exact low-class behaviour is why I didn't want to make a big thing of meeting your family."

I walked down the steps of the arch. My train dragged over the petals he had pulled down, and I stopped right in front of him, close enough to smell his cologne. I had bought him that too.

"Trent. Look at me."

He looked at his car keys instead, and he tossed them from one hand to the other.

"If you walk out that gate," I said, "we will never marry. Not today. Not ever."

The whole lawn heard me. Even Gloria heard it, and she pressed her lips into a thin line.

Trent didn't lift his head. "Keep quiet, and stop embarrassing yourself."

Then he walked away from me.

On his way to the gate he stopped in front of the old man with the cane, and I watched him fold himself into a deep bow with both hands pressed to his chest. In five years I had never once seen him bow to anyone.

"Mr. Wexley, thank you so much for coming," he said, and suddenly his voice was warm and careful and completely different. "Please stay. I'll be back in three hours, and my fiancée will take care of you. Delia! Get Mr. Wexley a cold drink, right now!"

The old man looked at him and said nothing at all. Trent held his smile for a few seconds, waiting, and when nothing came, he bowed again and hurried out through the gate.

The bridal car was waiting outside with white silk ribbons tied to both mirrors. I had tied those bows myself at midnight, because the florist had done them crooked and I wanted everything to be perfect for him. Trent got in behind the wheel and laid the three roses on the passenger seat, where I was supposed to sit. He pulled out so fast that the tyres screeched, and one of my white ribbons tore off the mirror and dropped into the dust of the road. Then the car turned the corner, and the lawn went quiet.

A bee landed on my bouquet, wandered across one petal, and flew away.

I turned around and looked at my family. My mother's eyes were wet, but she was holding her head up. Nolan's knuckles had gone white on his knees. And my father was sitting very still in his plain grey suit, looking at me with the face he wore in board meetings right before he ruined a competitor who had dared to cross him.

"Delia," he said quietly. "What is your decision?"

I looked down at my roses. They had opened all the way in the heat, and the edges had gone brown. I had held on to them for ninety minutes, because some stubborn part of me had believed that if I just held on long enough, he would come back and stand beside me.

I opened my fingers, and the bouquet dropped onto the hot stones.

Somebody gasped. I reached up, found the pins in my hair and pulled the veil out, pins and all. It hurt, and honestly, I didn't care. The wind picked the veil up for a moment and then let it fall on the grass, and all over the lawn the phones came up.

At the back, the old man tapped his cane twice and turned to the tall man beside him, a man in a dark suit and dark glasses who hadn't moved once all morning.

"I can't watch this," the old man said. "Let's go."

He was Walter Wexley. Trent had spent two years begging him for one hour of his time. He was also the man who had let me pull his tie at my fifth birthday party, and who still sent me a Christmas card every year with far too much money tucked inside. Trent knew none of that, because in five years he had never once asked me about my life before him.

The tall man was his son, Hollis. I knew his face and not much else. I had seen him at maybe ten dinners in my whole life, always at the far end of the table, never laughing at the jokes and never bringing a woman.

They were already turning toward the car park when it came back to me.

It was something from a long time ago. I was seven or eight, sitting under the dining table at one of my father's dinners with a plate of cake I wasn't supposed to have, and above my head Uncle Walter was laughing so hard the glasses rattled. If our children can't find anyone decent when they grow up, he had said, we'll just marry them to each other and save ourselves the trouble. My father had laughed with him, and they had clinked their glasses, and I had rolled my eyes under the table because boys were disgusting.

I turned to my father.

"Dad," I said. "Do you remember what you and Uncle Walter used to joke about when I was little?"

My father blinked at me. For a moment he just looked confused, and then I watched it slowly dawn on him what I was saying. His eyebrows went up. He looked over at Uncle Walter's back, and then at me again, and the corner of his mouth began to lift until he was smiling, really smiling, for the first time that whole terrible day.

I knew that smile. I had grown up with it. It was the smile he wore right before he picked up the phone and changed someone's life.

And that was exactly what scared me. If I stood there one more minute, he and Uncle Walter would be on the phone together, planning my marriage over my head, deciding the date and the guests and the flowers, the same way they had planned everything together for thirty years. And I would let them, because I always let people decide for me.

Not today. Today I wanted to choose something for myself.

So I picked up my skirt with both hands, and I ran.

I ran past the girl in yellow and past all those phones, and out through the gate where the bridal car had been. My shoes kept slipping on the gravel, so I kicked them off and kept going barefoot, and the stones burned the soles of my feet.

At the end of the row, a driver was holding open the back door of a black car. Hollis Wexley had one hand on the roof and one foot already inside.

"Wait!"

He stopped and looked at me over the top of his dark glasses. My hair was falling down on one side, my makeup had run, and I was standing barefoot on hot gravel in my wedding dress, with half the guests crowding at the gate behind me to watch.

I didn't care about any of it anymore.

"Mr. Wexley," I said, so out of breath that it came out in pieces. "You're single, right?"

He didn't answer. He just took off his glasses and looked at me properly.

I took a deep breath.

"Marry me. Right now."