A Wedding on the Banks Read Online Free Page B

and caught it up in his teeth. This aroused Vera’s suspicions more than anything.
    â€œNo matter how hard he pawed it, or shook it in his mouth like he does one of the kids’ socks when he wants to play, Goldie never give him a second of her time,” Vera told her uninterested husband. “She let him chew that crocheted hat to smithereens and yet, if you heard her talk, it took her weeks to make it, and it was past perfection. No, sir! She just went on inside her house, dragging that box.”
    Vera had watched out her window until there was just one big maroon diamond and a few strings left between Popeye’s paws, but still no Goldie to rescue her hat.
    â€œWhat jackpot do you suppose she hit?” Vera had thought. But that was before the newspaper had come, all snowy and damp because Vinal still hadn’t welded the mailbox door back on. Little Vinal had turned the mailbox into a play horse just a day before Christmas. He straddled the box, cowboy style, then tied a rope around the open door for reins. The billowing gust from the Mattagash snowplow had knocked him off, reins in hand, and with the reins came the mailbox door. But the newspaper wasn’t so snowy that Vera couldn’t read about the Christmas lights sale, and she put away her puzzlement at Goldie’s behavior in order to drive to Watertown for several boxes of lights.
    â€œIt ain’t just the Catholics who light up their yards,” Vera told Vinal as she was leaving. “I need to get there before the goddamn Protestants hear about the sale. They’re just greedy is all. What do they need extra lights for? There ain’t a single Nativity scene among them.”
    When Mattagash surmised through its complicated intelligence network of telephone calls, both the legal kind and the rubbering in kind, through the countless cups of strong Canadian-bought coffee downed while in pursuit of some new clue, through the close scrutiny of car tracks so as to tell who’d been out of their yard on December 26 and who hadn’t—when Mattagash set its mind to solve the mystery, it was just a matter of time until the icy finger of guilt pointed right up Goldie’s long driveway to her house on the hill. And it was Vera, the sister-in-law whom Goldie loved to hate, who had come back from Watertown lightless and downhearted, who did the most effective sleuthing. She called the manager at J. C. Penney’s to give him a verbal trouncing for exaggerating his sale. Madam, he assured her, there were forty boxes of the most colorful Christmas lights ever trucked to northern Maine. He had placed no purchase limitations on his customers. One lone woman had been there when the store opened and had bought them all. She was from Mattagash, he was certain. He had recognized the distinguishable old-country brogue that still survived in the accents of modern-day Mattagashers.
    Once Vera remembered Irma’s highly esteemed position at J. C. Penney’s as a kind of clerk with tenure, it didn’t take long to surmise what had happened. She put the phone down from bawling out the bewildered manager and marched out the door and up the hill to Goldie’s. On the icy trip up, she pondered their relationship. She had tried time and time again to be friends with her sister-in-law, but it had been futile. It had been like spitting into the wind and getting it back in your face. The real clincher had come when Goldie announced she was born again. She had spent a week in Bangor looking for her real father and had come back a Protestant. No one in Mattagash was happy about the conversion. The Giffords and a few other families in town were Catholic, and so hated to lose a sheep to the Protestants. The rest of Mattagash wanted no part of a Gifford in their fold, and they were certain God would feel the same way. Goldie’s own husband, Pike, was most confused over the transformation.
    â€œI don’t know why anybody would