Honey Cut novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Saturday

At the wedding Kit tears Seamus's signing paper in half in front of the crew, then learns her husband's bed is hers to refuse.

St. Brendan's smelled like wax and wet wool.

I wore my mother's cream coat over a dress Orla Carrick had bought me in a hurry.

I hadn't met her until an hour before, in the sacristy, when a tall woman with a silver-blond bob and red lipstick walked in carrying three pins in her mouth.

"I'm Niall's sister," she said around the pins. "I'm told you tore up my uncle's marker last night."

"I did."

"I'd like to shake your hand later. Right now, hold still."

She fixed my hem and said nothing else, and I liked her for it.

The church was packed.

Dockhands filled the pews in their good jackets, with big scrubbed hands folded on their knees.

Their wives had come in black.

Nobody smiled at me, but they looked.

My father wasn't there.

I had made sure of that, and it hurt more than I expected.

Niall waited at the rail in a charcoal suit with no tie.

He was taller than I remembered.

Kieran Fallon stood three steps behind him, hands folded, and when I started up the aisle I felt his grey eyes on me the whole way.

I did not look at him.

I kept my eyes on Niall's shaved head and the white collar of his shirt.

The priest read the words fast.

Niall said his part in the flat voice I was beginning to know.

I said mine, and my voice shook only once.

"By the power vested in me," the priest began.

"Wait," Seamus said.

He had been sitting in the front pew with a folded paper in his hand.

Now he stood and walked to the altar rail.

"Forgive an old man," he said, to the whole congregation. "There's a custom in this crew that younger people forget."

He put the paper on the rail, flat, next to the candles.

"The honey cut," he said. "The boss's wife holds ten percent of the dock take, and she signs for it every Friday. It's an old courtesy to the woman who marries into trouble."

A murmur went through the pews.

I looked at Niall.

His face hadn't changed at all.

"Naturally a girl from Dorchester Avenue doesn't know the ledgers," Seamus went on. "So I've kept it for the family since Niall's mother passed. Nine years. She can sign it into my keeping today, and we'll all have lunch."

He held out a pen.

It was a gold pen with a Carrick crest on the clip.

Forty people were watching me.

I could hear Orla breathing behind me, and I could hear someone's baby fussing in the back.

I took the paper off the rail.

It was one page, typed, with a line at the bottom that said Wife of Niall Carrick.

It gave Seamus the entire cut, for life, for any wife the boss would ever have.

I read it all the way down.

Then I tore it in half, and in half again, and I let the pieces fall on the altar steps.

"I don't sign things in church," I said. "And I don't sign things my father's creditor hands me."

The silence was so total I heard the wax drip.

Seamus's face went the color of old cheese.

"You stupid little girl."

"Father," Niall said quietly, to the priest, without looking away from his uncle. "Finish it."

The priest finished it.

My husband took my hand, and his palm was warm and dry and entirely steady.

He did not smile, and he did not let go.

In the pews the dockhands had started to look at one another.

One of them, an enormous gray-haired man in the third row, let out a short bark of a laugh.

Then another did.

I didn't know it then, but every one of them had spent nine years watching that money walk out of the yard.

The reception was in the Carrick house, a brick three-decker on a hill in South Boston with a walled yard and iron on the windows.

I stood in the kitchen with a glass of club soda, which was all I wanted, while the house roared around me.

Orla found me there and clinked her glass against mine.

"Ten years I've wanted to see somebody do that to him," she said.

"I wasn't trying to be brave."

"That's why it worked."

Across the hall Niall was talking to two captains.

Kieran stood against the wall behind him with a paper cup of tea.

Twice that afternoon I looked up and found him watching me, and twice he looked away first.

By ten the house had emptied.

Niall walked me up three flights of stairs to a bedroom at the top of the house.

It had a high white bed, a window on the harbor lights, and a fire somebody had already laid.

My suitcase sat at the foot of the bed, packed by a stranger.

I stood in the middle of the room in my mother's cream coat and didn't know what to do with my hands.

"This is yours," Niall said from the doorway.

I turned.

He hadn't come in.

He stood with one hand flat on the doorframe, the shamrock on his knuckles pale in the lamplight.

"The marriage buys nothing from this bed," he said. "Not tonight, not ever. You can lock the door. I'll be in the study."

"That's not what I expected."

"I know."

He looked at me for a long second, and I saw something move behind his eyes, heavy and held down.

Then he went down the stairs.

I closed the door and stood against it with my heart going like a drum.

Through the wood, from the landing outside, I heard a chair scrape.

Someone sat down in it and stayed there.

I didn't have to ask who.

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