Firefly Island by Lisa Wingate Read Free Book Online Page B

wedding, whether we had time for it or not. My mother was particularly determined that I would be married by the Presbyterian minister who had performed my sisters’ ceremonies. She pulled the minister out of retirement and forced my father to throw down big bucks for last-minute tuxedos,flowers, music, wedding cake, a zillion yards of tulle, and rented candelabras at the little white church I’d attended since childhood, albeit mostly on special occasions and holidays.
    Due to a surprise root canal a week before the wedding, and an inconvenient problem with the medications, I had practically nothing to do with the planning.
    On an evening of gale-force May storms, with a small crowd of family looking on, I walked down the aisle in a white dress worn by my grandmother, mother, and all four of my sisters. Technically, I was homeless, and almost everything I owned was in a shipping container bound for the Texas ranch of a man of uncertain reputation.
    My youngest niece panicked at the last minute and refused to walk the aisle with the basket of flower petals. Nick tugged her along and hammed it up with the ring pillow, stealing the show, but none of it mattered.
    I was marrying the man I loved. I was becoming a mom. I was no longer a lone entity, but half of a whole, one third of a trio.
    And all together, we were headed for Texas.

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.
    â€”Ashley Montagu
(Left by Alice, Cindy, and Paula on their annual Binding Through Books getaway. No fellas, no kids, no worries, just sisters and stories.)
Chapter 4

    T here’s something incredibly weird about spending your wedding night in the playroom of your childhood. Your mind flashes back to games of Monopoly and Life and to teenage parties where kisses were stolen while the adults were in the kitchen refilling the punch bowl. You feel like you’re doing something for which you’ll be caught by your parents any moment. For some, this may lend an atmosphere of danger to the wedding night romance, but for me it was just . . . embarrassing.
    It really wasn’t anyone’s fault that the hotel had been flooded by a sewage backup. In actuality, we were lucky. It’s better to find out about the sewer problem before you check into the honeymoon suite than after. It was late by then, and my mother made the command decision to boot some of my nieces out of the place we’d always lovingly referred to as the rumpus room —a little guest cottage that had served as the playhouse to beat all playhouses. Mostly, I remembered it as my older sisters’ teenage party spot, where I was typically not welcome after about eight in the evening.
    My mother, being ever resourceful, had enlisted my older nieces to give the rumpus room an emergency face-lift while Daniel, Nick, and I spent time in the parlor with Daniel’s parents. The nieces carried in leftover wedding flowers, then strung up the white twinkle lights and the yards of filmy fabric that had decorated the sanctuary during the ceremony.
    The twinkle lights glittered as Daniel and I entered the rumpus room, the glow illuminating haphazard organza drapes that hid shelves of old girl toys. Diaphanous curtains hung around the lumpy sofa bed, presumably to provide us with some privacy from Nick, who was supposed to be sleeping in a hotel room with Daniel’s parents, but had been clinging to his dad all night, insecure about the flood of new people. Now he was dozing and waking on Daniel’s shoulder, all worn out from a day that had started with cramming our remaining belongings into a small U-Haul trailer, and had ended here in the rumpus room. We were suddenly a family of three—five if you counted Barbie and Ken, whom my nieces (the smart alecks) had dressed in wedding attire and positioned in a passionate clutch on the bed of a well-worn Barbie Dream House.
    After tucking Nick into