One minute.
Marvin had made a career out of short minutes. He'd stood at the front of burning houses with a radio in his hand and sixty seconds to decide whether to send men inside.
You didn't spend a minute like that on speeches. You spent it on the one question that told you what you were really dealing with.
So he didn't talk about forgiveness. He didn't talk about Ryan's mother, or the funeral, or the empty bench with the white ribbon on it. He didn't say a word about the wedding.
He asked one question.
"Gunny," he said, "how many times have you watched that video of your son coming down the ladder?"
Tom Garza's face didn't change. Marines were good at that. But his hand tightened on the edge of the door, and he didn't answer right away, and for a man like Tom Garza, that was an answer.
"Who says I watched it?"
"I've been reading men at fire scenes for forty years," Marvin said. "You've watched it."
The porch light hummed. Somewhere down the ridge, a dog barked twice and quit.
Tom let go of the door. He looked past Marvin at the dark yard and the bare flagpole.
"A hundred," he said finally. "Maybe more. I quit counting."
He stepped back from the door, and Marvin understood that he was being let in.
The house was as neat inside as the lawn. There was a recliner, a lamp, a TV, and a shelf of books lined up by height. On the wall over the TV hung a shadow box with Tom's medals and a folded flag.
Next to it, in a cheap black frame from a drugstore, was a newspaper clipping. Local Firefighter Rescues Boy, 7, from Route 11 Blaze.
Tom didn't offer coffee. He sat down in the recliner and Marvin took the end of the couch, and for a while neither of them said anything.
"You know what that boy weighed?" Tom said. "The one he carried down. I looked it up. Forty-eight pounds. He had him over his left shoulder, and he came down that ladder through the smoke with one hand on the rail and his body between that kid and the fire." His voice was very even. "That's how we carried our wounded. I taught him that when he was twelve years old, in the backyard, with a sack of feed."
"I didn't know that," Marvin said.
"He probably doesn't remember." Tom rubbed his hand across his mouth. "I told that boy he quit. When he got out of the Corps. I told him Garzas don't quit, and I said it like he'd shamed me." He shook his head slowly. "He didn't quit anything. He just went into a different kind of building. I figured that out about the third time I watched the video. And by then I'd said what I said in his mother's kitchen, and he'd walked out, and it'd been four years."
"So you didn't call."
"What was I supposed to say, Chief? Sorry I was wrong for a decade?" Tom laughed, short and rough. "He sent me that invitation, and I sat right here and held it for two hours. I figured the last thing a man needs on his wedding day is his old man showing up and making it about the old man. So I checked the box. Regretfully declines." He looked at the shadow box on the wall. "I've been under fire. Checking that box was the most cowardly thing I ever did."
Marvin leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.
"He left your seat empty," he said.
Tom looked at him.
"Front row, left side. He asked me to keep it empty. I told him to put his crew in it, and he said no." Marvin let that sit a moment. "He said, it's his. I'm not giving his seat to somebody else."
Tom Garza didn't move. Then he took his reading glasses off the top of his head and folded them, very carefully, and set them on the table beside him. He kept his hand on them for a long time.
"I'm not going to tell you what to do, Gunny," Marvin said. "I'm a retired fireman. I marry people at the river park. But my old man was a Navy chief, and he and I went four years without talking once, and I always figured there'd be time." He stood up. His knees cracked. "I found out he died from my aunt. Two o'clock tomorrow. St. Paul's on Main."
He let himself out. He didn't look back at the house, because he didn't want Tom Garza to see him looking.
Marvin didn't sleep much. He didn't tell Ryan or Jess. If the bench stayed empty, he'd rather they never knew he'd tried.
On Saturday the church was full by a quarter till two. The groomsmen stood up front in their dark suits, and Ryan stood beside Marvin in his Class A uniform, navy blue with his badge and his ribbons and a black tie.
He kept looking down at his shoes. He didn't look at the left side.
At 1:52, the side door at the back of the church opened.
Marvin saw him first. A tall gray man in Marine Corps dress blues, the dark blue coat with the high white collar, the brass buttons, the gunnery sergeant's chevrons and rows of ribbons on his chest. White gloves.
White cover tucked under his left arm. He walked down the side aisle at the steady pace of a man who'd marched for twenty-two years and didn't know any other way to walk.
People in the pews turned to look. A murmur went through the church like a breeze through corn.
Ryan heard it. He looked up.
Tom Garza stopped at the front row, left side. He untied the white ribbon at the end of the bench himself, folded it once, and put it in his pocket. Then he looked up at his son.
Ryan came down off the step. He didn't seem to decide to. He just did, and his father met him at the end of the aisle in front of the whole church.
Neither of them said anything at first. Then Tom reached out with his white-gloved hands and took hold of his son's black tie.
It was a little crooked. Firefighters weren't Marines.
Tom straightened it, slowly, pulling the knot up snug to the collar the way he must have done the morning of Ryan's high school graduation, and the morning Ryan left for boot camp. He smoothed it flat against Ryan's chest with one hand.
"There," he said. His voice cracked straight down the middle. "Now you look squared away."
Ryan put both arms around his father and held on. Tom Garza held on back.
Marvin looked down at his pencil notes for the ceremony and found he couldn't read them. It didn't matter. He'd say it all by heart.
When the organ started and the doors at the back swung open for the bride, there was a Marine in dress blues sitting in the front row, left side, sitting straight as a flagpole. He didn't take his eyes off his boy once.