A Wedding on the Banks Read Online Free Page A

waves. She did not risk taking the time to fry a few slices of bacon and brown a couple of yesterday’s biscuits for breakfast. She’d breakfast in Watertown, after the sale, when the rear end of her car would be dragging with Christmas lights. Only then would she pull into Una’s Valley Cafe and have one of those big Farmer Breakfasts. So she had downed a quick cup of Taster’s Choice and then skimmed over the snowy road to Watertown in time for the store to open.
    On December 26, 1968, known as Boxing Day just across the border in Canada, Goldie stood outside the J. C. Penney store waiting for its doors to open at nine. She stood there in that blustery winter wind that poured down off Marquis Hill, gushed past the drugstore, and slammed into J. C. Penney’s at the street’s end. She pulled it off, too. Irma unlocked the door at nine sharp, and Goldie stomped the snow from her boots and went inside to buy every color of Christmas tree light known to man. There were forty boxes of firefly lights, big lights, blinking lights, nonblinking lights. Red. Blue. Green. Orange. White. It was Christmas all over again. Goldie knew she’d pull it off. No one in Mattagash would get their newspaper until Bond McClure brought it to them in his mail car around one o’clock. And no one in Watertown got early papers, either. They got theirs in the mail as well or waited until the paperboy got home from school to trudge up and down the streets flinging them to and fro.
    But even in the slow-moving cold of late December, word got out. A lot of women from Mattagash drove all the way over to Watertown in the afternoon. They barely took the time to dress properly once they read about the sale in the Watertown Weekly. They snapped the strings off their aprons and whipped them through the air. They abandoned smaller children to larger ones for tending. They tried to hide bobby pins and curlers beneath woolen kerchiefs. They sent boys outside in the cold to shovel out their cars. Some, who hadn’t plugged in their block heaters the night before, found to their disappointment that the engines wouldn’t turn over in December’s cold. They were out of the running unless they could trust a friend, because no one really wanted to let anyone else know about the sale. It was survival of the fittest. It was evolution in full swing. And it would seem that Goldie was the fittest of them all. It would seem that the descendants of Goldie Plunkett Gifford would be the first in line at any sale for many generations to come and would always have the finest holiday display of tinkling, twinkling, blinking lights that a small amount of money could buy. And that may have been true but for one thing. Charles Darwin had not met Vera Gifford.
    Vera had been scraping that morning’s oatmeal out of a supposed-to-be-a-no-stick pan when she heard her dog barking beyond its usual enthusiasm. She looked up from the sink in the direction of the barking dog, right up Goldie’s hill, and saw her sister-in-law carrying a box into her house. No, it looked more like a big box piled full of little boxes.
    â€œWhat do you suppose got her out of the house so early?” Vera had thought. Then, when the pan was shining again and ready to be rinsed, Vera heard a car door slam. She looked up quickly.
    â€œJust out of instinct,” she later told Vinal. “Just pure holiday instinct.” But there Goldie was, half dragging another box, and it looked full of little boxes, too!
    â€œShe was all nerves,” Vera told Vinal, “like she was trying to drag a dead body into the house. And she kept dropping her purse and trying to sling it back on her shoulder.”
    The drama had deepened when Goldie’s little white crocheted hat with the three big diamond shapes on it flew off her head and went tumbleweeding in the wind. That’s when Vera’s dog, Popeye, had gotten involved in the action, had gone after the hat