Waking Rose: A Fairy Tale Retold Read Online Free Page A

Rose said, trying a smile. A new song had started. “Come on, we can’t be grim at your own wedding! Remember this song from our sleepovers when we were kids? Let’s go dance to it.”
    She seized Blanche’s hand and tumbled out onto the dance floor to the beat of a sighing singer.
     
    But mama said
    you can't hurry love
    no, you just have to wait
    She said love don't come easy
    It's a game of give and take
     
    Rose threw back her head, put a hand on her heart, and sang woefully as Blanche laughed at her.
     
    How long must I wait,
    how much more can I take
    until loneliness will cause my heart,
    heart to break?
     
    The other Kovach girls, comrades from younger years, danced over to join them and the girls broke out into the crazy fifties-style dancing they had developed during nights of sleepovers on the living room floor. Tracy Kovach, now married and six months pregnant, grooved out onto the floor to dance with her younger sisters and their friends. Kateri Kovach, in her long bridesmaid’s gown, linked arms with her younger sister Monica and flipped the younger girl over her back to the shouts and shrieks of the other girls.
     
    No, I can’t bear
    to live my life alone
    I’m so impatient for a love
    to call my own
    And when I feel that I, I can’t go on
    these precious words
    keep me hanging on,
    I remember Mama said
     
    Not wanting to miss a cue, Bear leaped over and swept his bride into his arms as Blanche laughed and blushed, her full skirt billowing around her like a cloud. Blanche, Rose remembered, had always been the one who didn’t want to dance at the sleepover parties. But here she was, dancing at her own wedding with her handsome prince.
    Rose thought the two of them would go into one of Bear’s famous ballroom dance routines that he had wowed the sisters with before. But instead he put out a hand to Rose, smiling. He remembers , Rose thought, when it was just the three of us, him and Blanche and me. When we were all waiting.
    Grinning, Rose took his hand and her sister’s hand and the three of them danced together in the center of the party.
     
    You can’t hurry love
    No, you just have to wait
    She said love don’t come easy
    It’s a game of give and take
     
    The song was so wonderful that Rose’s spirits flew once more. As the song ended and everyone clapped, Rose was so blissful that she deliberately didn’t look over at Fish to see what his reaction was.
     
    H IS
     
    Bear and Blanche hadn’t left the reception openly. They slipped away, as planned. Blanche’s natural shyness had re-asserted itself, and after their last dance together, Bear had kissed her, taken her hand, and escorted her out of the hall, without any fanfare. Fish wasn’t sure how many people even noticed. He saw the couple walk down the hall and slip out the door. Bear had told Steven to park their car on the other side of the woods behind the hall, and the last Fish saw of them was the two walking, hand in hand, Blanche holding the train of her gown in one arm, heading through the tall grass of the back lot towards the trees beyond, as the sun glowed red off to their right.
    Fish leaned against the door, watching them until they disappeared into the woods. The bear had found his bride. Blanche had found her prince.
    He stood in deep silence, looking at the burning light of the sunset on the swaying grass of the field.
    He came out of his reverie to find Rose had glided up beside him and was leaning against the other doorjamb. He wondered how long she had been there.
    “So they’re gone,” she said at last, with a sigh.
    “Yes,” Fish said.
    “On their journey together, just the two of them at last,” Rose said softly.
     
“Some forgotten isle in far-off seas—
like a god going through the woods there stands
a mountain for a moment in the dusk
whole brotherhoods of cedars on its brow
and you are ever by me as I gaze,
are in my arms as now, as now, as now!
Some forgotten isle in the far-off