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for her use, the bride dressed slowly and carefully in her simple linen gown, trying not to fall apart with nerves. In the mirror her freckles looked as dark as paint splatters across her pale cheeks.
    Charlie’s kinky red hair was pulled back and smoothed, as much as it could be smoothed, into a handsome chignon and clipped with a carved ivory barrette loaned to her by her aunt Wilma. Wilma, tall and slim and white-haired, stood behind Charlie buttoning her dress. The starched-lace wedding veil and crown of white flowers sat on a little stand, on the office desk.
    For something blue, Charlie wore blue panties and bra printed with white roses, a private joke between her and Max. Over this, a white lace half-slip and camisole. The “something old” was her mother’s wedding ring, one of the few mementos she had from her dead parents. The new something was her long white linen gown with its low embroidered neckline and embroidered cap sleeves. Charlie’s calloused and capable hands shook both from nerves and excitement and from a sense of the unreal. Time seemed out of kilter, as if in some strange fantasy, the wedding preparations of the preceding few days swirling around her, each moment warped in time and place by her own disbelief.
    She was no child bride. At thirty-something she had almost abandoned the idea of falling truly in love andbeing married. Now that it was happening, and seeming so inevitable, she felt as if she had stepped into a different world and different time, or maybe stepped into someone else’s life.
    For a while she’d thought Clyde was the one, and that they might marry, but she’d never had this totally lost and committed and ecstatic feeling with Clyde. She and Clyde had ended up no more than good friends, the best of friends. Her feeling for Max was totally different. Her love for Max was the kind of nervous oneness that made her hands shake, made her tremble sometimes, and turned her terrified because he was a cop, terrified that he would be hurt, that she would lose him.
    â€œIs that a tear?” Wilma said, watching Charlie in the mirror. Wilma was dressed in a long, pale blue shift, her gray-white hair done in a bun bound low at her neck.
    â€œOf course it’s not a tear. I’m not the weeping sort. Steady as a rock.” She knew she’d have to get over her fear for Max, that a cop’s wife couldn’t live like that or she would perish; but right now it was all she could do to keep herself together and get to the altar with Wilma’s help and not collapse in a fit of uncontrollable nerves.
    â€œYou’re not steady at all. Are you this nervous on the firing range?”
    â€œI’m not on the firing range. I’m getting married.” She stared at her aunt. “This is different than the firing range. Tell me it’s different. Tell me…” She collapsed against her aunt, shivering, her head on Wilma’s shoulder.
    Wilma hugged her and smoothed Charlie’s hair. “It’s different when you’re marrying someone like MaxHarper. You’re having a perfectly normal case of nerves. And maybe second thoughts?” She held Charlie away, looking deeply at her, then grinned. “A simple case of premarital hysteria. I expect Max is having the same. You’ll be fine.”
    â€œNot second thoughts. Not ever. It’s just that…If I worried about him before, what will it be like after we’re married?”
    â€œHe’s sharp enough to have lasted this long,” Wilma said brusquely. “If something were to happen…just give him everything you can. Just fill what time he has—what time we all have. You must not fear the future, no one can live like that.”
    Wilma looked deeply at her. “You know what to do—you prepare as best you can for the bad times—then live every moment with joy.” She touched Charlie’s cheek. “Law enforcement and