of Letty‧s youngest sister, six years ago. She was remembered by her children as a saint, and Cordelia couldn‧t argue: Any woman who withstood the tempers and severe expectations of old man Haubstadt deserved some kind of deification, although it seemed to Cordelia like a dubious achievement, not to mention a questionable use of one‧s time on this Earth. In the family photographs, Mrs. Haubstadt appeared almost comically small when situated beside her husband. Of the five siblings, only Letty was petite like her mother. “The little one,” the others called her, and they treated her as though her size made her invisible.
The faces of each guest turned toward the bride, and though some of them tried to smile, their eyes seemed to say, I know what you‧ve done.
Lest their looks cut her, Cordelia reminded herself that she was only half one of them. While her mother had been raised in Union, the other half of Cordelia came from some glittering, far-off place, and like Letty, she was too big for the town she‧d grown up in. Letty was right, Cordelia now realized with some relief, to have insisted on a veil. Not only to protect her from the guests’ stares and the judgment in their expressions, but also because of John, who was now reaching for her hands. His eyes were shining, but she could not meet them. She didn‧t want any memory of the happy, expectant way he was gazing at her.
She wanted to remember John Field the way he had been on the day after graduation, when they‧d gone down to the place where the creek gets deep, and she had declared she wasn‧t going to ruin a perfectly good slip by swimming in it, and that if she went naked, he was going to have to, too. John had swallowed hard and watched her as he pulled his own clothes over his head and followed her lead into the swimming hole, running in to the knees, diving headfirst after that. Later they had crawled onto the pebbly bank, shivering and breathless from the cold. In the sunshine it had been so hot, you might have burned the bottoms of your feet, but in the shadows there was a chill. Then she‧d kissed him, burrowing against him for warmth, and when she‧d gotten bored of that, she had told him not to hold back the way they usually did. At first he‧d insisted they shouldn‧t, but eventually he couldn‧t resist her. His eyes were green, and they had gazed into hers, impressed, a little fearful, full of wonder. What he‧d done hurt at first, but then it was over, too quickly, and she‧d wanted to go on feeling that new sweet, searing pain all over again.
And she might have too, without any real consequence, had her cousin Michael not been peeping and run all the way home to tell Aunt Ida. When Cordelia had returned to help prepare the evening meal, there was blood on her slip and her hair was a mess, so it was impossible to lie about what she‧d done. Not that she wanted to.
“Just like your mother,” Aunt Ida had said, pressing her furious lips together so that the deep, vertical wrinkles below her nose emerged.
Just like your mother was what Aunt Ida always said, even when Cordelia was a little girl, whenever she was late for church or slow fetching water from the well, or when she became too happy or too sullen. Just like your mother, until young Cordelia began to wear the admonishment like a badge of pride. Just like your mother, Aunt Ida had repeated over and again as she bullied John, and Dr. and Mrs. Field, and Cordelia herself into agreeing to a private ceremony in the Lutheran church on Main, on the next convenient Sunday afternoon. Thus Aunt Ida secured two things she had always wanted in one fell swoop: her trouble-seeking niece out of her hair forever and the whole transaction sanctified in her favorite place, God‧s house.
Even standing with John now, at the front of the mostly empty church, all Cordelia could think of was escape. For though he was handsome and good, he would never be enough for her, and she could not help but anticipate the next fifty years of bleak winters and church picnics and screaming babies as no more than dreary distractions on the way to the grave. Not when she had that burning curiosity to see what lay beyond the