“Your friend Wu called last night,” he said. “Right after you and what’s-her-name left.”
“Candy.” I said. “My fiancée.” She and Aunt Minnie were standing right beside me, but Studs wouldn’t look at them. Studs had always had a hard time with girls and grown-ups—which is why I was surprised that he had become so attached to Dr. Dgjerm. Perhaps it was because the brilliant but erratic Lifthatvanian Realtor was, or seemed, so small, or far away, or both.
“Whatever,” said Studs. “Anyway, your friend told me that, as far as he could tell, the Leisure Universe was cast loose and set off safely. That Dr. Dgjerm survived.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, we have a plane to catch.”
“What a nice boy that Arthur is,” said Aunt Minnie, as we boarded the plane. I felt no need to respond, since she was talking to Uncle Mort and not to me. “And you should see all those medals.”
The departure was late. I found that oddly reassuring. Candy sat in the middle, her eyes tightly closed, and I let Aunt Minnie have the window seat. It was her first flight. She pressed the urn with Uncle Mort’s ashes to the window for the takeoff.
“It’s his first flight,” she said. “I read in Reader’s Digest that you’re less nervous when you can see what’s going on.”
“I don’t believe it,” muttered Candy, her eyes closed tightly. “And how can ashes be nervous anyway?”
The planes may be old on PreOwned Air, but the interiors have been re-refurbished several times. They even have the httle credit card phones on the backs of the seats. There was nobody I wanted to talk to for fifteen dollars a minute, but I wasn’t surprised when my phone rang.
“It’s me. Did the plane leave late?”
“Eighteen minutes,” I said, checking my notes.
“Numbers don’t he!” said Wu. “Things are back to normal. I already knew it, in fact, because my calculations came out perfect this morning. I released the first moth in the rain forest at 9:14 AM, Eastern Standard Time.”
I heard a roar behind him which I assumed was rain.
“Congratulations,” I said. “What about Dr. Dgjerm and his Leisure Universe?”
“It looks like the old man made it okay,” said Wu. “If his Universe had crashed, my figures wouldn’t have come out so good. Of course, we will never know for sure. Now that our Universe and his are separated, there can be no exchange of information between them. Not even light.”
“Doesn’t sound like a good bet for a resort,” I said.
“Dgjerm didn’t think it all the way through,” said Wu. “This was always his weakness as a Realtor. However, he will live forever, or almost forever, and that was important to him also. Your friend Studs cried with relief, or sadness, or both when I told him last night. He seems very attached to the old man.”
“He’s not exactly a friend,” I said. “More like a childhood acquaintance.”
“Whatever,” said Wu. “How was your Honeymoon?”
I told him about the headache(s). Wu and I have no secrets. I had to whisper, since I didn’t want to upset Candy. She might have been asleep, but there was no way to tell; her eyes had been closed since we had started down the runway.
“Well, you can always try again after the ceremony,” Wu commiserated.
“I intend to,” I said. “Just make sure you get to Huntsville on time with the ring!”
“It’ll be tight, Irv. I’m calling from a trimotor just leaving Quetzalcan City.”
“An L1011? A DC-10?” The roar sounded louder than ever.
“A Ford Trimotor,” Wu said. “I missed the nonstop, and it’s a charter, the only thing I could get. It’ll be tight. We can only make 112 mph.”
“They stopped making Ford Trimotors in 1929. How can they have cell phones?”
“I’m in the cockpit, on the radio. The pilot, Huan Juan, and I went to Flight School together in Mukden.”
Why was I not surprised? I leaned over to look out the window, and saw the familiar runways of Squirrel Ridge, the airport, far below.
“We’re getting ready to land,” I said. “I’ll see you at the wedding!”
I hung up the phone. Aunt Minnie held the urn up to the window. Candy shut her eyes even tighter.
9.
Divorces are all alike, according to Dostoievsky, or some Russian, but marriages are each unique, or different, or something. Our wedding was no exception.
It started off great. There’s nothing like a morning ceremony. My only regret was that Candy couldn’t get the whole day off.
The weather was perfect. The sun shone down from a cloudless sky on the long, level lawn of the Squirrel Ridge Holiness Church. Cindy’s catering van arrived at ten, and she and the two kids, Ess and Em, started unloading folding tables and paper plates, plastic toothpicks and cut flowers, and coolers filled with crab cakes and ham biscuits for the open-air lunchtime reception.
All Candy’s friends from the Huntsville Parks Department were there, plus the friends we had in common, like Bonnie from the Bonny Baguette (who brought her little blackboard with the daily specials written on it; it was like her brain) and Buzzer from Squirrel Ridge, the Nursing Home, complete with diamond nose stud. My friend Hoppy from Hoppy’s Good Gulf, who happened to be a Holiness preacher, was officiating. (“Course I’ll marry Whipper Will’s young-un to Whipper Will’s Yank, ‘nuff said.”).
Aunt Minnie looked lovely in her colorful Lifthatvanian peasant costume (red and blue, with pink lace around the sleeves) smelling faintly of mothballs. Even Uncle Mort sported a gay ribbon round his urn.
It was all perfect, except—where was Wu?
“He’ll be here,” said Cindy as she unpacked the ice sculpture of Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveler (the only thing the local ice sculptor knew how to do), and sent Ess and Em to arrange the flowers near the altar.
“He’s on a very slow plane,” I said.
Finally, we felt like we had to get started, Best Man or no. It was 11:55 and the guests were beginning to wilt. I gave a reluctant nod and the twin fiddles struck up “The Wedding March”—
And here came the bride. I hadn’t seen Candy since the night before. She looked resplendent in her dress white uniform, complete with veil, her medals gleaming in the sun. Her bridesmaids all wore khaki and pink.
Since I was short a ring, Hoppy slipped me the rubber O-ring from the front pump of a Ford C-6 transmission. “Use this, Yank,” he whispered. “You can replace it with the real one later.”
“Brethren and sistren and such, we are gathered here today…” Hoppy began. Then he sniffed, and cocked his head, and looked around. “Is that a Ford?”
It was indeed. There is nothing that stops a wedding like a “Tin Goose” setting down on a church lawn. Those fat-winged little birds can land almost anywhere.
This one taxied up between the ham biscuit and punch tables, and shut down all three engines with a couple of backfires and a loud cough-cough. The silence was deafening.
The little cabin door opened, and out stepped a six foot Chinaman in a powder blue tux and a scuffed leather helmet. It was my best Man, Wilson Wu. He took off the helmet as he jogged up the aisle to polite applause.
“Sorry I’m late!” he whispered, slipping me the ring.
“What’s with the blue tux?” I knew it wasn’t the one I had reserved for him at Five Points Formal Wear.
“Picked it up last night during a fuel stop in Bozeman,” he said. “It was prom night there, and blue was all they had left.”
Hoppy was pulling my sleeve, asking me questions. “Of course I do!” I said. “You bet I do!” There was the business with the ring, the real one (“Is that platinum or just white gold?” Cindy gasped). Then it was time to kiss the bride.