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brother.
    “Help me drink it more like.” They both laughed and he walked down the hall to Jared’s bedroom. Jared’s passion was cars and not ranches and his father knew it, the only one who truly loved the ranch, who understood it, who loved the land as he did, was Crystal. He walked past the bedroom where Becky was dressing with her mother’s help, and knocked on his son’s door. “Come and help me move the tables, Son. There’s still work to do outside.” They had set long tables with white linen cloths, left over from his own mother’s wedding half a century before. The guests would eat shaded by the enormous trees that surrounded the ranch house.
    Tad Wyatt poked his head into Jared’s room and found him lying on the bed, looking at a magazine full of pictures of women. “Can I interrupt you long enough to give me a hand, Son?” Jared jumped to his feet with a nervous grin, his tie askew, and his hair slicked back with a tonic he had bought in Napa.
    “Sure, Dad. Sorry.”
    Tad was careful not to rumple the boy’s carefully styled hair, and put a powerful arm around his shoulders. It seemed odd to him that one of them was getting married so soon. In his mind, they were still babies … he could remember Jared learning to walk … and chasingchickens … and falling off the tractor when he was four … teaching him to drive when he was seven … hunting with him when he was hardly taller than the rifle … and Becky barely older than that, and now she was getting married.
    “It’s a fine day for your sister’s wedding.” He looked up at the sky, and smiled at his son, as he directed Jared and three of the ranch hands where to put the tables. It was another hour before everything was set to his liking, and when he went back to the kitchen for a cool drink with Jared, Crystal was gone, and there was no sign of any of the women. All of them were in Becky and Crystal’s room now, exclaiming over the dress, and sighing and dabbing at their eyes as they saw Becky finally in her lace and gauzy splendor. She was a beautiful bride, as most girls are, and all of them were pressed around her, offering her their good wishes, and making veiled comments about her wedding night, until she blushed hotly and turned to see Crystal quietly slipping into her own simple dress in the corner. The dress offered no excitement at all and yet in its stark simplicity, it only seemed to set off her beauty more. The treasured nylons were carefully in place, and the flat white pumps didn’t add to her considerable height. And as she stood quietly in the corner, and they turned to look at her, with her sheaf of pale gold hair, and a little halo of baby’s breath and white roses, she looked almost like an angel. By comparison, Becky seemed overdressed, overdone, and far less striking. Crystal seemed to be frozen in place in a rare moment between childhood and womanhood, there was no artifice to her, nothing raw, nothing sharp, only the subtle smoothness of her startling beauty.
    “Well … Crystal looks very nice,” one of the women said, as though by ordinary words one could make her less dazzling, but it couldn’t be done, Crystalwas who she was, and nothing could diminish that, not even the plain white dress that she wore. As one looked at her, all was forgotten except the graceful way she moved and her incredible face beneath the halo of innocent white flowers. Becky was carrying white roses, too, and the women in the room had to force themselves to turn around and exclaim over her again. But there was no denying it. It was Crystal who was the beauty.
    “We’d better be going,” Olivia said finally, and led the women outside to where her husband and Jared were already waiting. They were using separate cars to get to the church. The wedding itself was going to be small, their friends were invited to the lunch afterward, but very few had been invited to the church service.
    Tad watched the women as they came down the porch