THE KENNARD HOUSE · SATURDAY MORNING

The fog burned off by nine. It was going to be a perfect day. Everyone said so.

In the upstairs bedroom, Angie Stalcup fastened the last of the thirty-two satin buttons down the back of the dress, and stepped back, and burst into tears.

"Angie, stop it, you'll make me cry, and I just did my eyes."

"I can't help it. Kim, look at you."

Kimberly looked. In the long mirror, in her mother's ivory satin with the seed pearls, she looked like the photograph on the piano downstairs, the one of Charlotte Kennard on the church steps in 1954. She turned to the door, where her mother stood holding the veil.

"Mother? Is it all right?"

Charlotte didn't answer right away. She was holding the veil so tightly that her knuckles were white.

"Mother. You look like you've seen a ghost."

"It's perfect," Charlotte said, and smiled, and came in and pinned the veil, and her hands were shaking so badly that Angie had to do it over. On the bed, beside her handbag, sat her sewing basket. Kimberly thought that was strange. Who brings a sewing basket to a wedding?

THE POSEY HOUSE · THE SAME MORNING

Eric Posey had hauled traps in a nor'easter at fifteen. He had pulled his own father's empty boat in off the ledges at twenty-six. He could not tie his tie.

"Come here," Helen said. She did it in about four seconds, the way she'd done it for his father every Sunday for twenty-seven years. Then she reached into her apron pocket and took out a watch: an old steel one, with a cracked leather band.

"Your father wore this the day he married me. I want you to wear it today."

Eric put it on. He couldn't say anything. He hugged her instead.

Over his shoulder, Helen looked out the kitchen window, down the hill, to the harbor master's office on the end of the town wharf. The door was closed. The boat was gone.

"Mom? You okay?"

"I'm fine," Helen said. "It's a wedding. Everybody cries at a wedding."

HARBOR CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH · ELEVEN O'CLOCK

The white church on the hill had never been so full. The Kennards and their people on the left. The Poseys and theirs on the right. Down the middle, most of the town, who had come to see whether the two families could get through one hour in the same room without somebody throwing a hymnal.

Pamela, a bridesmaid in pale green, stood at the front and watched her mother in the first pew and Charlotte Kennard in the first pew across the aisle, and thought: neither one of those women has blinked in ten minutes.

And at the very back, in the very last pew, all by himself, sat the harbor master.

The organ began. Theodore Kennard, in his good gray suit, walked his daughter down the aisle, and for once in his life he looked like he didn't know what to do with his face. When they got to the front he lifted her veil and kissed her on the forehead, and put her hand in Eric Posey's, and held on to it for one second too long.

Reverend Shotwell opened his book and smiled at the whole room.

He began, and the old words went on, warm and familiar, the way they had in this church for two hundred years, and Kimberly looked at Eric and Eric looked at Kimberly, and everyone in Port Ellery began to breathe again.

"If anyone here knows a reason these two should not be married," Reverend Shotwell said, "speak now, or..."

Charlotte Kennard stood up.

The whole church turned. She was holding a white envelope.

"I'm so sorry," Charlotte said. Her voice was perfectly steady. "Kimberly. Eric. I am so sorry. But I can't let this happen."

"Charlotte," Theodore said. "Sit down."

"No, Teddy. Not this time." She took out the pages and unfolded them, and read, in front of everyone. "Probability of paternity: ninety-nine point nine percent." She looked up at her husband. "That's you, Teddy. You're Eric's father."

For a second nobody made a sound. Then everybody did.

Kimberly's bouquet hit the floor. Eric turned around, not to Charlotte, not to Theodore, but to his mother, and said, "Mom?"

Helen Posey had gone as white as the church walls. She didn't look at her son. She didn't look at Theodore. She looked past all of them, to the very last pew.

It was empty.

"That's a lie," Theodore Kennard said. He said it loud enough for the whole church. "That is a lie. I never... Helen, tell them. Tell them I never..."

But Helen didn't say anything at all.

Kimberly picked up her skirt in both hands and ran. Down the aisle, past the Poseys and the Kennards and the whole town, out the doors and down the church steps in her mother's wedding dress. Angie ran after her. Eric stood at the altar alone for a long moment. Then he walked out the side door, and slammed it so hard that the hymn numbers fell off the board.

In the third pew, Valerie Kennard took her husband's hand and patted it, and looked down at her lap so that nobody would see her smile.

OUTSIDE · ELEVEN-THIRTY

People were spilling out onto the church lawn in their good clothes, talking all at once, when the fire siren went off.

Everyone looked down the hill. Over the harbor, a column of black smoke was rising, and under it, at the end of the wharf, the cannery's north wing was burning.

"Lee's on today!" Doug Warford shouted, already running for his truck. "Lee's in there!"

Chief Lynch was running too, tearing off his tie. Half the volunteer fire department was standing on the church lawn in suits.

By the time the trucks got there the whole north end was in flames. Lee Callen came stumbling out of the smoke with his shirt over his face, coughing. "Mr. Kennard! The office... the old ledgers... I couldn't get to them..."

The ledgers. A hundred years of Kennard Packing, in Theodore's grandfather's handwriting.

"Dad, no!" Christopher shouted. "Dad, they're just books!"

But Theodore Kennard had already pulled off his good gray jacket and gone in through the smoke.

And a moment later, while everyone stood frozen on the wharf, a second man ran in after him. A big man with a white beard, in a harbor master's jacket.

Then, with a sound like the whole world tearing in half, the roof of the north wing came down.

~