"Four hundred people laughed at the fake tiara on the poor bride's head — until a jeweler in the fourth row stood up and asked her where she got it.

The bells began at ten and they did not sound like a wedding to me.

I waited at the back of that church alone, stared down the length of the aisle, and could not make myself take the first step.

My dress was lace, secondhand, hem mended by me over four evenings.

There was dust on it.

Real dust — I'd walked the last mile and a half from the hardware store lot because the car wouldn't start, in June, in a wedding dress, past a gas station and two men who whistled.

And on my head was a tiara.

Costume stones.

Arthur had placed it in my hands the night before, in his truck, and said his grandmother would expect me to wear something.

Under all that light it looked exactly like what everyone decided it was.

At the front, beside the altar, stood Agatha.

Seventy-nine, dark green dress, silver-headed cane striking against the stone floor.

*Clack.

Clack.

Clack.*

She hadn't spoken to me once in two years.

She'd spoken about me plenty — I work at a veterinary clinic and my mother cleans houses, and in that family those two facts get said in one sentence, as an explanation.

I made eleven steps before the whispers started.

Somebody near the back said *Halloween*.

A woman in the fourth row laughed into her hand.

Arthur's cousin said, loud enough to carry, "Is that from a party store?"

I kept walking.

I'd decided in the parking lot that whatever happened in there, I was getting to the end of that aisle — because the man waiting at the end of it had sat with me in a truck the night before and said one thing.

"They're going to be ugly about it.

I'm still going to be standing there."

Then Agatha raised her cane and pointed it at my head.

"Take that off," she said.

"I will not have cheap glass in this church."

The entire room went quiet.

And in the fourth row, a man of about sixty stood up.

His name is Dermot Vashti.

He has run a jewelry business in that town for thirty-one years and he was there because he does the family's appraisals, and has since 1994.

He did not glance at Agatha.

He looked at me.

"Miss — I'm sorry.