My husband came home after three years in Chicago and slept with his arm around my waist for the first time in our marriage. “Who taught you to hold me like that?” I asked. He said, “If you pretend you don’t know, you can keep being my wife.”

“They read the bench,” I said, “and then they had the party anyway. Just without the toast.”

He laughed.

His bride, beside him, didn’t.

She looked at me for a long moment, the way women do when they recognize a story that’s been told without the middle.

“Was it you?” she said.

“It was me.”

“And you’re planning weddings.”

“I’m planning weddings.”

“After that.”

“Because of that,” I said. “I know exactly what a yard looks like when it’s wrong. It means I know what one looks like when it’s right. Yours is going to be right. I’ll hang the lights myself.”

I did.

Forty strings.

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