“It’s your forty now,” I said. “Recorded Monday. In your name alone, before the wedding. If you ever walk away from me, it walks with you. Nobody can ever take it from you. Including me.”
“Why?” Her voice cracked right down the middle. “Why would you do this?”
I had thought for three months about how I would answer that. In the end I just said the plainest thing I had.
“So that nobody, not your dad, not anybody in this room, not you either, ever has to wonder for one minute what I married you for.”
Hannah started to cry. Not pretty crying either. She put her face down into her paper napkin and her shoulders shook, and the napkin fell apart in about three seconds.
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Karen leaned over to see what was happening. She saw the deed. She read the top line upside down, and then she sat back in her chair and put her fingers to her lips and looked at me with her eyes shining.
Arvid was at the far end of the head table talking to the pastor. He hadn’t seen any of it.
Grandma Marie had. She reached over from her wheelchair, slowly, because her hands were bad with arthritis, and laid one hand over Hannah’s and the other over mine, so the three of us were joined there on top of that deed.
“Walt Rasmussen,” she said. Her voice was thin and clear. “When I was in the sixth grade and Walt was a big eighth grader, my father’s barn burned, and we lost the heifers. Walt walked over the next morning leading his own 4-H calf on a rope.”
“It was the only thing he owned in this world. He tied her to our fence post and walked home without saying anything. My father tried to give her back, and Walt’s father wouldn’t take her.”
She patted my hand twice, very lightly.
“Your grandfather would have done the very same thing,” she said. “The very same. I’d have bet the farm on it.”
That was when I came close to losing it myself. I had to look at the ceiling tiles for a while.
Hannah lifted her head. Her face was a mess and her mascara was on her cheeks and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. She folded the deed back up along its creases very carefully.
She didn’t give it back to me. She kept it in her lap under her napkin through the cake and the toasts. I saw her look down at it twice. I thought she was just holding onto it.
I should have known better. She’s an Ostergaard.
At half past ten they formed the receiving line at the bottom of the stairs, by the fellowship hall door.
It was Hannah and me, then my mother, then Karen and Arvid. Everyone filed past to shake hands on their way out to the parking lot.
There were about a hundred and forty people. Neighbors, church people, Hannah’s friends from the clinic, my seed customers, half of Watonwan County, it felt like. My hand got sore after the first forty.
Arvid had stepped out of the line a few minutes in to walk the pastor up the stairs. When he came back down, he skipped his own place and came straight to us, the way fathers of the bride do, to shake the groom’s hand properly.