The Fountain by Emily Grayson

Author:Emily Grayson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2001-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

They were married in August. This time there was no tent, no dress, no music, no fanfare at all. Instead, Casey and Michael were ushered into a small room in City Hall late on a Friday afternoon, where an electric fan hummed in the corner and the justice of the peace glanced at his watch a few times during the brief ceremony. Casey wore a simple skirt with wildflowers on it and a sleeveless blue blouse; Michael wore a white linen shirt and a pair of pressed khakis. Standing there stiffly in Room 405, they looked less like a bride and groom than like two college students who were visiting the registrar about a change in their course load. But this was what they wanted: nothing special, a whisper of a wedding.

Michael’s parents stood beside the couple, and though sentiment was kept to a minimum during the recital of vows, Janice Becket couldn’t stop herself from crying a little, and then Casey began crying, too. Michael looked at her as the tears slid down her cheeks, and his face softened in that moment. He appeared relieved that she was crying, for it allowed him to think there was unfettered emotion in play in the overheated air of this City Hall office.

Let him think that, Casey thought. There are worse things. It wasn’t entirely untrue, but it wasn’t true in the way he would have hoped.

Later, in their suite at the Longwood Falls Inn—Casey sitting on the edge of the bed and pulling off her pantyhose while Michael stood loosening his tie—he suddenly said to her, “I liked it when you cried.”

“Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t meant to. It just happened.” But she knew she hadn’t been crying because she loved him the way he deserved to be loved; she’d cried for more complicated reasons: because he was a wonderful man who had never given up on her, because her parents were gone forever and weren’t there to see her marry, and, finally, because he was not Will Combray. He was so much better than Will, of course, yet knowing this didn’t make it easier. Embarrassed by these thoughts now, Casey stood up from the bed and embraced Michael, burying her head against the clean surface of his shirt.

Casey and Michael Becket spent the beginning of their marriage in a tiny apartment on the top floor of a brownstone on Benefit Street in Providence. He was finishing up art school, and she had transferred to a teachers’ program at a small local college. They were happy together in a restrained way, eating meatless dinners to save money and sitting up late at night on a mattress on the floor with an Indian-print blanket stretched across it. Orange crates served as furniture, except for two beautiful pieces that Michael had built at school and brought home, and the walls held nothing but a few Rembrandt and Vermeer prints pinned up with thumbtacks.

Casey and Michael felt both very young and very old

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