The Bride Ran, So I Wore Her Crown and Married the Valley's Don novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Choreg

Three days before Armenian Christmas, Shushan taught me to braid choreg.

We stood at the farmhouse kitchen table at six in the morning with flour to our elbows and forty loaves to make.

"Three strands," she said, in Armenian. "Not so tight, jan. The dough has to breathe."

She took my hands in her floury ones and showed me how to cross them.

Her hands were strong and sure, and not at all the hands of the woman who called for a dead boy at night.

Since the evening of the bread, Garo had kept quiet.

He had not sent for another Friday report or said another word to me in the street.

It frightened me more than any threat.

"My Vahan hated the river," Shushan said, pinching a loaf closed. "He wouldn't go near it. The other one loved it. Armen would stand in it up to his knees in January, and come home blue."

"You talk about Armen as if he's here," I said carefully.

She stopped.

For a moment her eyes were as clear as water.

"In the morning I know which one is gone, jan," she said. "It's only at night that I forget."

I did not know what she meant, and she turned back to the dough.

"Armen could fix anything," she said. "A radio. A tractor. Anything with a screw in it. His father would say, give it to the boy. I never knew where he got it."

She said it fondly, and in the past tense.

I thought of the foreman, and the wrench, and the girl's arm, and I put the thought away.

The flood had changed him, everyone said so.

The first of the loaves went into the oven, and the house filled with the smell of it, sweet and eggy and warm.

On the fifth of January, in the afternoon, my husband came to the shop.

He had never come to the shop before.

He stood inside the door in his gray overcoat with a big flat box in his arms.

He stamped the cold off his shoes on my mother's mat.

"I don't wrap well," he said.

"Is that for me?"

"It is for your mother."

I put down my scissors.

He set the box on the cutting table and took the lid off.

Inside, on a square of clean flannel, sat my mother's sewing machine.

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