Chapter 24: Never Checked Out

They were married at dusk, on the porch, under four hundred paper lanterns.

Shiori read the Temple words with her voice shaking.

The old sergeant had come back from the ridge with his helmet under his arm.

He stood at the gate as a guard of honor.

Tamae stood beside Hanae, and held her bouquet of kitchen herbs.

"The bride is twenty-four and the groom is thirty-four," Tamae told the whole village.

"Anyone with a complaint can say it now, and then I will hit you with a ladle."

Nobody had a complaint.

Jiro wore his indigo coat, brushed clean, with no sword at his hip.

His sword lay in the rack by the door, in its plain black scabbard.

Above it hung the sign in Hanae's handwriting that said No blades past the lantern.

When she came down the steps, he looked at her.

He held her anyway.

They cut a rice cake in the yard, and the village ate it.

The children chased each other under the lanterns until they fell asleep on the porch.

At midnight the last guest went home.

Hanae put out the kitchen fire, and took the ledger from the counter, and went up the stairs with it under her arm.

He was waiting in Room Three.

The window stood open to the night, and below it, over the door, the old lantern burned with its small yellow circle on the road.

Someone had changed the quilts.

A small jar of oil stood on the low table.

She shut the door, and leaned on it, and looked at him.

He was standing at the window in his shirtsleeves, with one hand on the sill.

"Wife," said Jiro, as though he were trying out the word.

"Husband."

"I have decided I like it."

"So have I."

She set the ledger on the table and crossed the room.

"Sit down," she said.

"Hanae..."

"Sit. I'm the one with the oil."

His eyes darkened.

He sat on the edge of the futon, and she knelt in front of him and took his face in her hands.

She kissed him once, and slowly.

Then she began on the buttons of his shirt.

She undressed him as she had on the first night, one piece at a time, and she did not hurry.

She folded each piece and set it aside.

There was the jagged mark over his heart, and the round scar on his hip, and the long white line under his arm.

There was the new gash across his chest, pink and healing, and the scar at his neck that she kissed last of all.

He sat very still under her hands.

He no longer shook.