Chapter 24: The One Who Gets Up

We were married at the deli counter on a Saturday afternoon, with the cold case humming behind us.

Nonna had moved every table to the walls and hung white paper lanterns from the pipes.

She had told the priest to be brief, and the priest, who was her cousin, had learned not to argue.

I wore her dress.

It was cream silk with long sleeves, forty-nine years old.

A tailor in Scranton had taken it in at the waist, and cried through the whole fitting.

Maxim stood at the end of the aisle between the provolone and the bread.

He wore a gray suit and the cufflinks I had picked out for him in my second year.

He did not stop looking at me until I reached him.

Luca sat in a corner chair in a white gown and the yellow hat.

He was wedged between two cushions and a very serious old man from the parish.

He was awake, and he was chewing his own fist.

There were sixty people in that little shop, which was forty over the fire code.

Half of Scranton had come in from the sidewalk.

Six of the board had come, too, in their good suits, holding paper plates.

One of them was the man from the windowsill, who had brought a casserole.

At the front, with a three-month-old girl asleep on her shoulder, stood the young woman from marketing.

She caught my eye and mouthed, Twenty weeks.

I laughed out loud in the middle of my own wedding.

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