Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 26: The small ceremony
AMY
She had never wanted a large wedding.
She had known this about herself since she was about twenty, when she’d been a bridesmaid in her college roommate’s wedding for three hundred people at a venue in Dallas and had stood in the receiving line for forty-five minutes thinking: *I would like a room with twenty people and excellent food.*
She told Jake this.
He said: *Good. I was going to say the same thing.*
She said: *Twenty people.*
He said: *Twenty-five. My mother has opinions about the guest list.*
She said: *Your mother can have thirty.*
He said: *Thirty.*
She said: *On the farm.*
He said: *On the farm.*
She said: *October.*
He said: *October.* He paused. *You’ve been planning this.*
She said: *I’ve been planning this for some years, yes.*
He looked at her.
She said: *Not the specifics. Just the shape.* She paused. *The shape was always the farm and the people who mattered and not a three-hundred-person venue in Dallas.*
He said: *Fair enough.*
Planning a wedding of thirty people in a small town in four months was less complicated than most things she had managed in her career as an elementary school teacher, which had taught her that the logistics of thirty small humans was significantly more complex than the logistics of thirty adults with functional motor skills.
She organized it the way she organized everything: by phase, by milestone, by date.
Linda was enthusiastic in the specific way of a woman who had been waiting for this for ten years and was not going to make it anyone’s business how enthusiastic she was. She suggested the south field for the ceremony — the live oak was large enough for shade, the grass was right in October — and she organized the catering through the Garland BBQ that had been feeding the county since 1978, and she called Mrs. Callahan and Mrs. Henderson and the five women she’d been doing Sunday church with for thirty years, and they made decisions about chairs and flowers and the cake with the speed and efficiency of people who had done this before many times.
Jake stayed out of the cake discussion.
He said: *I trust you and my mother.*
She said: *That’s wise.*
He said: *I have opinions about everything else.*
She said: *Tell me.*
He said: *I want Kowalski there.* He said it carefully. *He’s — he’s my family. That side of it.* He paused. *I know it might be weird. A man from the unit at a wedding in a Texas field.*
She said: *Nothing about that is weird.* She put his name on the list. *Who else.*
He said: *There’s a guy from the group sessions. Marcus.* He paused. *Not your Marcus.*
She said: *I know. The Tuesday group.*
He said: *He’s been coming since October. We don’t talk much outside the group but—* He paused. *He’s the first person from the group I’ve considered outside the group.*
She said: *That’s significant.*
He said: *Yes.* He paused. *Is thirty-two people too many.*
She said: *Thirty-two is perfect.*
She wrote the invitations by hand, which Linda had suggested and which she had agreed to because Linda was right that the handwritten version meant something the printed version didn’t. She sat at the kitchen table and wrote thirty-two invitations over two evenings and Jake sat across from her and drew.
He was drawing the farm in October — the specific quality of October light on the south field, the way the live oak looked when the days were shorter and the shadows longer.
She said: *You’re drawing the wedding.*
He said: *I’m drawing the field.*
She said: *Which is where the wedding is.*
He said: *It’s a coincidence.*
She said: *You have twenty-three studies of the kitchen window. You don’t do coincidence.*
He almost smiled.
She finished the last invitation.
She said: *You know what I want for the vows.*
He said: *Tell me.*
She said: *I want the true thing. Not the ceremony version.* She paused. *The version that says what it actually means.* She paused. *What we’re actually committing to.* She looked at him. *The bad stretches and the good days and the protocol and the sketchbook. The real version.*
He said: *That’s the scariest version.*
She said: *Yes.*
He said: *Good.* He looked at her. *Scary means it matters.*
She said: *Exactly.*
She thought about October. She thought about the farm and the thirty-two people and Kowalski from the unit and Marcus from the Tuesday group and Mrs. Callahan and Mrs. Henderson and the BBQ from 1978 and the live oak and Jake.
She thought: *this is the thing I’ve been moving toward.*
She thought: *I have been moving toward this since the tailgate and the stars and the way he carried my butterfly project three blocks without dropping it.*
She thought: *I am going to marry Jake Mitchell in October under the live oak in the south field.*
She thought: *it took twelve years and it was worth it and I would do it the same way.*
She thought: *the time was the time.*
She thought: *he had to go. He had to come back. We both had to grow into the people who could do this right.*
She thought: *we got there.*
She thought: *thirty-two people in the south field under the live oak in October.*
She thought: *yes.*
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