Chapter 4: Saturday

I got married on a Saturday in my mother's cream dress, taken in at the waist by a woman at the dry cleaner's.

It was the only good thing she had ever owned, and she wore it once, to my aunt's wedding in 1998.

The stone church on Prospect Avenue smelled like candle wax and old wood.

Ania sat in the front pew in a wheelchair, with her IV pole parked beside her.

The hospital had given her a four-hour pass, and she had spent every minute of it complaining about the lack of snacks.

"Don't look so green," she whispered when I walked past. "You look like a ham."

"That's your word."

"It's a family word now."

Oma sat across the aisle in a navy suit, with her cane across her knees.

Dieter sat in the last row, alone, with his arms folded.

I saw him watching me walk, and I lifted my chin.

Matthias waited at the altar in a charcoal suit that fit his shoulders.

He had trimmed his beard.

He looked at me coming down the aisle, and for a second his whole face came undone.

Then he put it back together, and I told myself I'd imagined it.

The priest was an old man with kind eyes and a bad cough.

He asked if anyone knew a reason we shouldn't be married.

Somebody's chair scraped in the back, and nobody spoke.

"Do you, Matthias, take Hanna?"

"I do."

His voice was low and perfectly steady.

"Do you, Hanna, take Matthias?"

I looked at him.

He was looking at me.

"I do," I said.

The words went into my chest like a stone into water.

"You may kiss the bride."

We had agreed on a kiss, a short, polite one, for the audience.

We had practiced exactly zero times.

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