My Stepsister Ran From the Wedding, So My Stepmother Sold Me to the Man Who Hates Her Mother novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Traded to the Don Who Hates My Name
He asked me on the first morning of the shrimp season, on the end of Pier 19, at five o'clock, with the boats going out.
I had named the day in October.
He had kept it in a drawer for eight months.
I had not expected him to be nervous.
He stood on the boards in his work shirt with the first light coming up pink over the Gulf.
Behind him the whole fleet moved out in a line of diesel smoke and gulls.
"I had a speech," he said.
"I know."
"It's gone."
"Good," I said.
He took a small box out of his pocket and did not open it.
He held it out on his flat palm, and I looked at it and then at him.
"Nina Scalise," said Marcello. "I'm asking you now, because nobody has ever asked you anything in the right order."
"Go on," I said.
"You can say no. The dock is yours either way. Your father's name is on the lease and mine isn't."
"I know that," I said.
"You can walk up this road, and I will stand here and watch you go."
"I know," I said again.
"I'd rather you didn't," he said. "Will you marry me? Properly. With a priest and your own name and nothing signed behind your back."
I looked at the box.
I looked at the Mary Ignazia going out past us, with her green hull freshly painted and her nets hung.
My father's old deckhand stood at her wheel and lifted a hand to me.
My father sat in his chair at the end of the dock beside me with a blanket over his knees.
He lifted his cap and set it back on his head.
"Yes," I said.
Marcello did not move.
"Yes," I said again, louder. "I'm free to go, and I'm staying, and yes."
He opened the box then.
It was a plain steel ring, thin as a wire, cut from the same steel as my mother's bracelet.
I had told him once, in the dark, that I wanted to wear them together.
He put it on my finger.
His hands shook so badly that my father laughed, a short rusty sound.
It was the second time I had heard him laugh since the cellar.
We were married that Saturday at Star of the Sea.
I had not thought I would want a church.
Then I wanted it more than anything, because it was where it had begun, and I wanted the same stones to hold the other end of it.
The bride's room was the same bride's room.
It had the same radiator and the same vanity and the same stained-glass window with the sailor on it.
I stood in it alone at eleven in my own dress.
It was plain ivory cotton, cut by a woman on the Strand, with a straight neckline and no train.
I had paid for it myself, out of the money from the fish-market displays.
My hair was down.
My mother's bracelet was on my left wrist and the thin new ring was on my finger.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Stepsister Ran From the Wedding, So My Stepmother Sold Me to the Man Who Hates Her Mother are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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