Free Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult Page B

in for coffee. I was terrified at first,
because I thought I'd have to face all the secrets I had been running
from. For a day or so, I even fought against the idea, but how could
I stand in the way of something that was meant to be?
    I
knew all along he was the one. I could fall into step walking beside
him, even though his legs were much longer. I could sense when he
came into the diner by the way the sleigh bells on the door rang. I
could think of him and smile in just a heartbeat. Although I would
have loved Nicholas if he never had proposed, I surprised myself
by thinking of tree-lined residential streets and soccer car pools
and Good
Housekeeping recipes
curled into handmade sanded boxes. I envisioned a normal life, the
kind I'd never had, and even if I would be living it as a wife now, I
figured it was better late than never.
    The
dean of students at Harvard gave Nicholas a one-week hiatus from
classes and hospital rotations, during which we would move into
married student housing and set a date with a justice of the peace.
There would be no honeymoon, because there wasn't any money anymore.

    Nicholas
pulled the sheet away from me. "Where did you get that?" he
asked, running his hands over the white satin. He slipped his fingers
beneath the thin straps. His breath brushed the hollow of my neck,
and I could feel us touching at so many points—our shoulders,
our stomachs, our thighs. He moved his head lower and circled my
nipple with his tongue. I ran my hands through his hair, watching a
shaft of sun bring out the blue base under thick black.

    Marvela
and Doris, the only two friends I had in Cambridge, took me shopping
at a small discount-clothing store in Brighton called The Price of
Dreams. They seemed to carry everything there for a woman's wardrobe:
underwear, accessories, suits, pants, blouses, sweats. I had one
hundred dollars. Twenty-five came from Lionel, a wedding bonus, and
the rest was from Nicholas himself. We had moved into married student
housing the day before, and when Nicholas realized that I had
more art supplies in my knapsack than clothes, and that I had only
four pairs of underpants, which I kept washing out, he said I needed
to get myself some things. Although we couldn't afford it, he gave me
money. "You can't get married in a pink uniform from Mercy,"
he had said, and I had laughed and answered, "Just watch me."
    Doris
and Marvela flew around the store like seasoned shoppers, Girl,"
Marvela called to me, "you lookin' for something formal like, or
you gonna go with funky?"
    Doris
pulled several pairs of panty hose off a rack. "Whaddya mean,
funky," she muttered. "You don't do funky at weddings."
    Neither
Doris nor Marvela was married. Marvela had been, but her husband was
killed in a meat-packing incident that she did not like to talk
about. Doris, who was somewhere between forty and sixty and guarded
her age as if it were the crown of Windsor, said she didn't like men,
but I wondered if it was just that men didn't like her.
    They
made me try on leather-trimmed day dresses and two-piece outfits with
polka-dotted lapels and even one slinky sequined cat suit that made
me look like a banana. In the end, I got a simple white satin
nightgown for the wedding night and a pale-pink cotton suit for the
wedding. It had a straight skirt and a peplum on the jacket and,
truly, it seemed to have been made for me. When I tried it on, Doris
gasped. Marvela said, shaking her head, "And they say redheads
ain't supposed to wear pink." I stood in front of the three-way
mirror, holding my hands in front of me as if I were carrying a
spilling bouquet. I wondered what it might have been like to have a
heavy beaded dress hanging from my shoulders, to feel a train tug
behind me down a cathedral aisle, to know the shiver of my breath
beneath the veil when I heard the march from Lohengrin. But
it wasn't going to happen, and anyway it didn't matter. Who cared
about the trappings of one stupid day when you had the rest