GREED(106)

“I hope so.”

“What a thing to say.”

“Time to get serious, people,” the woman announced, but she looked directly at us, inciting another laugh from us. “In a moment, the bride will come through here. The groom’s up front already. Remember, just like rehearsal! This is go time.”

The door to the cry room opened and out came my sister and she was breathtaking. A lace top and dupioni silk skirt. I know this because she and Cricket would tell me about it, like I gave a crap. I was glad they did though. Looking at her in that moment was one of the proudest of my life.

She strode forward and I stopped her before she met our mother’s side.

She smiled wide. “Bridget, you look stunning.”

“Thank you, brother,” she said, kissing my face.

I hugged my mom. “You too, Mama.”

She palmed our cheeks. “I’m so proud. So very proud of both of you.”

Bridget leaned down and kissed her daughter. “You look very beautiful too, Savannah. Very grown up.”

Savannah beamed and bounced on her heels.

I walked back to the end of the line and stood beside my wife. I tucked her dainty hand in my arm and laid my own on top of it.

The piano started and Savannah bounded forward, radiant and bursting with happiness. She gracefully laid lavender down on the stone floor of the church and made it all the way to the end of the aisle, but when she saw Jonah standing at the front, instead of standing to the side like she was told, she ran up to him and held his hand.

The wedding planner tried to get her to come down, but Jonah stayed her with a hand and kept Savannah with him.

The wedding party descended down the aisle couple by couple until it was our turn. I twisted around and winked at my mom and Bridge.

When it was our turn, I strode down the same aisle I had with Cricket just two years before for our own wedding.

“This bring back memories?” she whispered.

“I believe we did it in the car then too,” I whispered back, making her bite her bottom lip and nod.

I shook my head at her. Cheeky.

We reached the end of the aisle and we were forced to separate, which I hated, but I knew I’d be able to look at her through the whole ceremony, so it was my only consolation. The piano stopped and a string quartet began to play “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” as my mom and Bridge started to walk the aisle.

As I watched them, I looked upon my wife, down at my incredible Savannah, then Jonah, Ellie, and Emmett, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I deserved such a preposterously happy and beautiful life. They were my family. They were my everything. I looked over at Cricket and the tears slipping down her face told me she felt the same way.

My mom and Bridge had reached the end of the aisle and I watched my mama give my sister to Jonah. I’d never seen either of them look happier than that moment. The moment where they, all three of them, became an official family. Savannah already called him daddy. She had from her three hundred and sixty-third day and he was. He truly was her father.

During the four years since Savannah’s birth, Bridge had finished high school, gone to college, earned a bachelor’s in agriculture, raised Savannah with my mom and Jonah and had carved herself a niche of perfect life, not because life was perfect, but because it was perfect for them.

Cricket and I had moved to New York briefly after graduating college to pursue Cricket’s sculpting career, which she was hugely successful at, but we missed our family too much and decided to trek back to Montana.

Now, she ran a successful gallery of her own work in town and she shipped all over the world. She was well known in art circles and much sought after.

I was in my second year in law school, studying immigration law, working closely with my friend Sophie Price in Uganda. We were hoping to make a streamlined process to help the orphans there and get them homes here on the American side.

My mom won the Hunt Ranch in the settlement when my dad filed divorce years ago and she gave it back to the Hunts. They returned to their homestead and it was as if they never left. Jonah and the girls stayed back on the new ranch and ran that as a second homestead, a continuation of the Hunt Ranch, if you will.

Some of those profits helped Cricket and me complete school, and it supported us while I finished law school as well. It also helped fund many projects in the Congo, where a friend of Sophie and Ian Aberdeen’s opened a second Masego.

All in all, God had been very good to us. Generosity is one of those traits rarely used, but it is, by far and away, one of the most rewarding gifts one could ever possess. I lived by many things, but my top motto was “give.” Give, and you shall see the incredible rebound of it. The more you give, the more you get. It’s a staggering notion, but the truth nonetheless.