The Night Before Page 3

  “Her brother was going to visit her today. Did she tell you that? To be with her during my wedding, because she couldn’t come here.”

  “I didn’t know,” Lydia said.

  “From the terrible thing that happened to the lemon orchard, this day came.”

  “How do you mean?” Lydia asked.

  “If I were still in the orchard with my family, I never would have come here, I never would have met Danny.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And I never would have come here to live, gotten to know you, my other mother,” Isabel said. “That’s what my mom calls you. Thank you.” Then she took Lydia’s hand and they walked along the sandy beach path.

  When they got to the high bank, they all pitched in dragging branches from the flatbed and throwing them onto the sand. The beach was long and narrow, a barrier between Long Island Sound and a salt pond, and in recent years had lost several feet to erosion. Storms ate away at the bank; several years ago a nor’easter had opened a bight, shifted the sand so a channel now ran from the open water back to the salt marsh.

  Everything changed, even the contours of the land. Lydia had often set up her easel right here, painted the beach, the mouth of the river, the lighthouses in Fenwick, on the other side. She sometimes thought this was the exact view her parents had looked out at, when she was a small child, but that wasn’t accurate. The beach had been wider then. The driftwood logs here today were different than the ones they had played on all those years ago.

  “Should I go back?” Isabel asked, sounding nervous.

  It was two o’clock; the wedding invitations had said five. The catering crew would be pulling up at the house by now, getting ready to set up in the clearing. Isabel was covered with dust and pine needles; her hands were splotched with pine tar.

  “Yes,” Lydia said, hugging her. “You’re the bride, and you’re already beautiful. But go get ready.”

  All the trees had been unloaded. Snug against the curved bank, they were already settling into the sand. They would stay there all summer, and one October day, perhaps around Halloween, Lydia would invite the wedding party to return to this beach for a bonfire. Her mother would have liked that. It was the kind of gathering she had imagined when she’d created the circle of trees, the clearing that had been made for celebrations.

  Lydia expected to be back by then. She hadn’t told anyone but Sara, but she’d gotten sick. She had the same disease as both their mothers, lymphoma. When the wedding was over she would have a course of chemo, and then would go down to San Miguel de Allende. She was going to paint. Sara would join her; if Lydia needed help, Sara would be there.

  The number of wedding guests was small, drawn from Danny and Isabel’s circle of friends from New York and Black Hall. A few professors and artists from the college arrived, and so did several friends of the Byrnes’s from New York.

  Fifty people altogether, sitting in the circle—bigger now, with the inner ring of trees gone—listening to Andy King, the bagpiper of Hubbard’s Point, play the pipes while Lydia walked Isabel down the same aisle of trees her father had walked her.

  Isabel looked beautiful in her grandmother’s wedding dress. The strong wind had dried the ground so thoroughly there’d been no reason to worry about the hem getting wet. She held tight to Lydia’s arm; Lydia wasn’t sure who was most supporting whom.

  “I wish my mother were here,” Isabel whispered as they drew within sight of the clearing. There was Danny standing beside his father, beaming at the sight of her.

  “She is here, darling,” Lydia said, just as her dad had said to her at her own wedding, when she’d whispered the same words about her own mother. The breeze blew and rustled the boughs of the trees still standing, and Lydia and Isabel heard their mothers’ voices as they walked into the circle.

  Dear Readers,

  Thank you so much for reading The Night Before. I loved writing it because it brings together the past and the future. Danny first appeared in my novel Silver Bells—many of you have written to tell me it’s a favorite of yours; some of you saw the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie. Amazing things happen in nature, at the edge of the sea. I have set so much of my fiction along the Connecticut Shoreline, and I loved returning there for this story.

  My novel The Lemon Orchard, out in trade paperback 5/27/14, starts in a Connecticut beach community and travels to Malibu, California. Like certain actual lemon orchards, it is full of love and magic. Please click on the link to enter the world of Julia and Roberto, and learn how far they each traveled to find love:

  The Lemon Orchard

  And here is Silver Bells, an old favorite:

  Silver Bells

  Love,

  Luanne

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  The Night Before

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