I Signed Away Eight Million to Leave Him novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Every Line
"I asked him," I said.
Ivy screamed so loudly a man on the next dock dropped his fishing rod.
My mother just nodded.
"Good," she said. "Then you'll do it properly. Get dressed. I brought donuts."
Corbin came up through the hatch behind me in his trousers and nothing else, with my pencil behind his ear again.
"Morning, ma'am," he said.
My mother looked at him. At his bare chest. At the pencil.
"Put a shirt on," she said. "You're marrying my daughter."
We got married at the Sea Cliff on the last Saturday of September.
Not in the ballroom.
On the front porch, in Sea Cliff gray, with the sea behind us and the wind blowing everyone's hair sideways.
There were thirty-one chairs.
I counted them because I couldn't stop counting things. It was that or cry.
The housekeeper and her girls had strung the porch rail with white flowers from the hotel garden.
The cook had made a cake four layers high, with a sugar seashell on top, painted by a left-handed woman of eighty-two.
The bartender carried the owner's wicker chair to the front of the porch and set it down in front of the rail.
She'd gotten herself ordained on the internet the week before.
"It took four minutes," she said. "I could have done it in 1971 and saved my husband a fortune."
I wore a plain ivory dress that I'd drawn myself on the back of a paint sample, and sewn by a woman in Providence who'd cried when I showed her.
My hair was down. No pencil.
My mother walked me out the front door and down the porch.
She didn't cry. She was a night nurse. She'd seen everything.
Halfway to the end of the porch, she squeezed my arm and said, very quietly, "Pick your own ceilings."
Then she let go.
Ivy stood at the end of the row as my maid of honor, in a black suit with a bar towel in her breast pocket instead of a handkerchief.
"For the allergies," she said.
Corbin stood beside the owner's chair in a navy suit with no tie, and his reading glasses in his pocket, just in case.
He watched me walk the whole way.
He didn't look at anyone else.
The owner held up one small hand, and thirty-one people went quiet.
"Dearly beloved," she said. "I'm not going to say much. I hate speeches. Neve knows."
"I know," I said.
"Corbin. Do you take this woman, who has painted half my hotel and argued with me about the other half?"
"I do," Corbin said.
"Will you stay?"
That wasn't in any vows. She'd added it.
He looked at me.
"Every night," he said. "Every one."
The owner turned her sharp blue eyes on me.
"Neve. Do you take this man, who carried my bathtubs?"
"I do."
"Well, then," she said. "Fine."
It was the best word she had.
Ivy whooped. The housekeeper's girls threw rice they'd been told not to throw.
Corbin kissed me with the sea behind us, and his hands were steady this time.
We ate cake on the porch until the sun went down.
The bartender made a drink and named it after me and it was terrible.
The cook danced with my mother. The owner danced with no one and criticized everyone.
Ivy fell asleep on a porch swing with her shoes in her lap.
At midnight Corbin took my hand and walked me up three flights of stairs, past the third-floor hall camera, which the housekeeper's grandson had turned off for the night, to the bridal suite.
The heart-pine floor glowed.
The seashells ran around the walls, pink and white, hers and mine.
The brass bed stood under the window, made up in white, with the sea in the big mirror over the fireplace.
Corbin shut the door and leaned on it.
"Mrs. Gorman," he said.
"Finally," I said.
He leaned on the door like he had all the time in the world.
I didn't.
"Turn around, Mrs. Gorman."
I turned, and my hair swung across my bare shoulders.
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