For one glorious second, Lorna Brekke had won.
She felt it all the way down to her sensible shoes. Sixty-five years.
A dollar bet at a wedding cake table in 1962. And Sigurd Thorsen, the slow-smiling farm boy who'd never once lost his temper or his car keys, had walked right past his own wife and kissed the wrong twin.
She almost snorted. She caught it just in time.
Across the room, by the coffee urn, Lila had gone perfectly still in her green dress. Her face had gone pale. The cup in her hand tipped a little and slopped coffee onto her shoe, and she didn't notice.
Then Sig leaned down a little closer to Lorna's ear, as if he were going to whisper something sweet to his bride of sixty-five years.
"Hello, Lorna," he said softly. "Nice dress. Lila looks better in it."
Lorna stared at him.
Sig straightened up, slow and tall. He patted her once on the shoulder, gently, the way you'd pat a good cow that had just done something foolish. Then he turned around and looked at his grandson by the record player.
"Erik," he said. "Turn that down a minute, would you."
Erik lifted the needle. Lawrence Welk stopped in the middle of a polka. A hundred and forty people turned around.
Sig took the microphone off the stand by the cake table, the one the pastor had used for the blessing. He held it like it might go off.
He'd never been a talker. In sixty-five years, Lorna had heard him say maybe a thousand words in a row, total.
"Folks," he said. "Thank you for coming. I want to tell you a little story."
He looked across the room at his wife.
"In 1962, at our wedding, right about where I'm standing now," Sig said, "my new sister-in-law bet me a dollar I couldn't tell her and my wife apart." He smiled his slow smile. "I didn't take the bet. I figured she'd try it sometime. So I've been waiting."
A ripple of laughter went through the basement. The six people in on the swap went red.
"Today they finally did it. Switched dresses, switched earrings, switched those glasses." He shook his head admiringly. "Lorna even quit laughing. I've never seen Lorna go ten minutes without laughing. That took real discipline."
The basement roared. Lorna put her hand over her face.
"So I thought I'd give her a minute," Sig said. "She's been waiting sixty-five years. Seemed only fair she should get to feel like she won." He looked over at Lorna, and his eyes were twinkling. "That was your minute, Lorna."
"How did you know?" somebody called from the back. It was Lorna's son, who'd helped with the earrings.
Sig didn't answer right away. He looked across the room at his wife again, standing by the coffee urn in her sister's green dress with coffee on her shoe.
"Lila hums," he said.
The room went quiet.
"When she's nervous," Sig said. "Always has. Just under her breath, so you'd hardly hear it. She did it the first time I ever asked her to dance, at the Vernon County Fair in 1961. Right in the middle of the dance floor. Beautiful Savior, all four verses. I thought she was humming because she liked me." He smiled. "Took me about a year to figure out she was humming because she was scared to death."
Somebody laughed softly.
"She hummed at our wedding. She hummed when our kids were born, every one of them. She hummed in the waiting room at the hospital in La Crosse when I had my heart surgery in '04. I could hear it through the door." He cleared his throat. "When I walked in that door a few minutes ago, she was standing by the coffee urn in that green dress, and she was humming Beautiful Savior. I could hear it from across the room."
He set the microphone down on the cake table.
"Lorna doesn't hum," he said. "Lorna's never been nervous a day in her life."
Then he walked back across the basement. Slowly, past a hundred and forty people who stepped aside to let him through. Past the Jell-O salads and the bars and the Swedish meatballs.
He stopped in front of his wife.
Lila was crying. She was laughing, too, with her hand pressed against her mouth, and she still had coffee on her shoe.
"You never test a man," she whispered.
"Never needed to," Sig said.
And he leaned down, and kissed his wife of sixty-five years on the cheek, in her sister's green dress, while the whole church basement stood up and clapped and whistled. Two of the Lutheran ladies at the kitchen pass-through were crying into dish towels. The pastor was laughing so hard he had to sit down.
Erik dropped the needle back on the record. It was "The Tennessee Waltz." Somebody had planned that, and Lorna had a pretty good idea who.
Sig held out his hand. Lila took it. And an eighty-eight-year-old farmer in a brown suit and his eighty-five-year-old bride in the wrong dress walked out to the middle of the church basement floor and danced, slow and careful, under the blue and silver streamers.
She hummed the whole time. Sig didn't seem to mind one bit.
Lorna watched them from the cake table.
After a while, she opened her sister's pocketbook, which she was still carrying, and took out the little picture frame she'd hidden in it that morning, just in case. She'd bought it at the drugstore in Viroqua for four dollars and ninety-nine cents. Inside, behind the glass, was a folded 1957 silver certificate with a blue seal.
On a strip of paper below it, in her careful mail carrier's printing, she'd written: Paid in full. Lorna Lyngstad Brekke to Sigurd Thorsen.
One dollar. Bet of June 23, 1962.
She'd made it in May, the night Lila said yes. She'd told herself it was just in case.
The truth was, she'd known all along. She'd watched that man look at her sister for sixty-five years. Lorna had never once in her life wanted to lose a bet so badly.
When the waltz ended, Sig walked Lila back toward the cake table. Lorna held out the frame.
Sig took it. He read it. He looked at Lorna for a long moment over the top of it, and his slow smile came all the way out.
"I'll hang it in the barn," he said.
"You'll hang it in the living room," Lila said. "Over the piano. Where I can see it."
"Yes, dear," said Sig.
And Lorna Brekke laughed out loud, with a snort, for the first time all afternoon, standing at the cake table in her sister's best blue dress, with the framed dollar in her brother-in-law's big hands.