Georgia
He asked her in the car, not the kitchen. She would remember that, the unglamorous absurdity of it, both of them stuck at the single red light in town on the way home from a scan she’d insisted on going to alone and let him drive her home from anyway.
“Marry me,” Axel said, looking straight ahead at the light, both hands on the wheel, in the exact tone he might have used to observe that it looked like rain.
“That’s not a question.”
“No.”
“You’re supposed to ask.”
“I’ve watched you refuse a question once already,” he said. “Figured I’d skip the part where you get to say no before you’ve had time to actually think about it.”
She stared at him, at the deeply unromantic set of his jaw, at the light still stubbornly red.
“Axel, I’m dying.”
“I’m aware.”
“I don’t want to be somebody’s deathbed wife. I don’t want people saying you married me out of pity, or obligation, or because you couldn’t figure out how to say no to a dying woman.”
“Nobody who knows either of us is going to think that,” he said, “and the ones who don’t know us can think whatever they want, because their opinion isn’t on my list of things I’m spending what’s left of our time worrying about.”
“It’s not fair to you. Marrying someone who’s going to—”
“Georgia.” The light finally turned green. He did not move the car. Behind them, someone honked; he ignored it. “You spent a year mourning twenty years you didn’t get to choose. I’m asking you to let me choose how I spend mine. I know why you — I know you think you’re protecting me. You tried that already. It cost us six weeks I’d like back.” He stopped, and started again. “Everybody has something to lose. I’d like to lose you as my wife. That’s the whole request.”
The car behind them honked again, longer this time. Georgia looked at him, at the tattoo just visible beneath his rolled sleeve, LIVE EACH DAY, and knew that refusing again would protect him from nothing. It would only be more counting what she couldn’t have, spent inside the months she did.
“Yes,” she said, and the word came out on something between a laugh and a sob. “Yes, Axel, drive the car, you’re going to get us both killed by someone who actually just wants to get through this light.”
He drove. He was smiling the whole way home, an unguarded, boyish smile she had never once seen on him before, not even in their easiest early months.
The wedding, three weeks later, was small enough to fit in Axel’s backyard.
There were nine people present, including the officiant, a retired judge Marcus knew who agreed to do it as a favor and cried more than either the bride or groom, and Marnie, who had driven six hours with a pie she swore she had made herself, cried nearly as much. Georgia wore a pale blue dress she’d bought years ago and never worn, kept in the back of a closet for an occasion she’d assumed would look different. Axel wore a suit that did not quite fit him, borrowed at the last minute from Marcus, sleeves an inch too short, and neither of them cared at all.
Marnie drove the six hours with the pie belted into the passenger seat like a third person, and somewhere around the second hour, alone on the interstate with the radio turned low, she let herself cry for exactly eleven minutes by the dashboard clock, the way she’d been rationing it out in private since the diagnosis so that Georgia would never once have to manage her sister’s grief on top of her own. She thought about their mother’s funeral, the two of them fifteen years younger and both certain, in the particular arrogance of people who haven’t yet lost much, that they had years and years before anything like this would come around again. She thought about her own marriage, eleven years steady and unremarkable in the way she’d always been secretly grateful for, and understood, driving toward her sister’s second wedding in a single year that wasn’t really a second wedding at all, that unremarkable was not the same as guaranteed, and that she had been taking Doug and the two kids and every ordinary Tuesday of her own for granted in exactly the way Georgia used to. At the eleven-minute mark she wiped her face, checked it twice in the visor mirror, and did not let herself start again. By the time she pulled into Axel’s driveway she had rebuilt the version of herself her sister needed to see: steady, useful, dry-eyed, ready to fix hair and set out folding chairs and be furious at nobody.
Before the ceremony Marnie found Axel by the folding table where the cake was sweating in its box and said, without preamble, “I hung up on you.”
“You did.”
“I’d like to say I was wrong.”
“You weren’t wrong. You were loyal.”
“It can be both,” said Marnie, and put the pie in his hands, and went to fix her sister’s hair.
Weeks earlier, quietly, Georgia had taken the ring Benjamin had given her, kept for reasons she’d never examined in a drawer she rarely opened, and sold it, and used the money to buy two plain bands, nothing extravagant.
The vows were short. Neither of them could manage more than a few sentences without their voices failing.
“I don’t have fifty years to give you,” Georgia said, holding both his rough, familiar hands in her own thinner ones. “I only have what’s left. I want you to have all of it, on purpose, with my eyes open, because I choose you.”
“I don’t need fifty years,” said Axel, his voice breaking on nearly every word. “I spent fifty years thinking I didn’t need anybody at all, and I was wrong about that the whole time. I’ll take whatever we get. I just want it to be with you.”
The small crowd of nine did not manage to make it through the vows without crying, and afterward there was cake, store-bought and slightly lopsided, and an hour of quiet, ordinary conversation in the backyard as the light went gold and then gray, and if Georgia had to lie down early, before the last of the guests left, nobody made anything of it. Axel walked her inside, settled her on the couch with a blanket, and came back out to say goodbye to the witnesses, a married man for the first time in his life, at fifty.
The following week, on one of her better days, Georgia insisted on driving them both to the nursery herself.
“I don’t need you picking it,” she told him, when he offered, more than once, to go without her and simply bring a few options home. “I want to see it before it’s ours.”
She walked the rows slowly, leaning on his arm more than she’d have liked to admit, and passed over the mature trees entirely, the safe, sensible choice for a couple who wanted quick shade and no waiting. She chose, instead, a young dogwood, barely taller than she was, its branches still bare and a little awkward, nothing about it yet decided.
“It’s small,” Axel said, not arguing, just noting it.
“I know.” She ran a hand along one thin branch. “I’d rather plant something that still has to figure out what it’s going to be than something that already finished deciding without us.”
There was a tag wired to one branch, the kind nurseries stapled to everything, and she turned it over and read it out loud before he could stop her: Average mature height fifteen to twenty feet. Lifespan, sixty to eighty years. She laughed, short and real, at the sheer administrative optimism of it, a tree being sold to a dying woman with a life expectancy quoted in decades. “Outlives us both by a mile,” she said, tucking the tag back against the trunk instead of pulling it off. “Good. Somebody should.”
They put it in the ground themselves that weekend, in the corner of the backyard visible from the kitchen window, Axel digging while Georgia directed him from a lawn chair with more opinions about depth and drainage than either of them could have anticipated her having. When it was done she sat with her hand flat against the disturbed earth, and Axel did not ask what she was thinking.
The marriage, in its first weeks, was mostly small things. He learned she could not sleep without a fan running, even in February, and bought a second one for his side. She learned he read the last page of every book first and could not be broken of it, and that his defense was always the same: he liked to know where he was going. He hummed while he shaved. On Sundays they drove to a diner past the county line for pie that was worse than Marnie’s and ate every bite. They had one argument that lasted the whole season, over a Western they kept rewatching. He said the ending was sad, because the man dies. She said the man dies at home, on purpose, with the porch light on, and that this was as happy as an ending got. Neither of them ever gave in.