After Rejection, Divorced Luna Becomes a Famous Doctor novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: The Same Booth

Fergus lunged for the box.

Ciara put it behind her back.

"No," she said. "Not here. You said the booth. You practiced in the booth for a week."

"Ciara."

"You said the booth, Uncle Fergus."

Fergus stood in the middle of a medical school coat room with his tie crooked and his mouth open.

Then he put both hands over his face.

"I did say the booth," he said through his fingers.

So we went home.

The relief cook looked up from the grill when the four of us came in at a quarter to one.

He saw Fergus's face and turned the radio off.

The diner was nearly empty.

Two cabbies at the counter, a nurse coming off a late shift, the jukebox dark.

Ciara marched straight to the back booth by the kitchen door.

The red one.

The one I'd sat in, green and soaked, the first night.

"Sit," she said to me.

I sat, with the baby asleep on my shoulder.

"You sit too," she told Fergus.

He sat across from me, enormous in his gray suit.

Ciara stood at the end of the table.

She held the velvet box in both hands and cleared her throat.

"Uncle Fergus is too scared," she announced. "He practiced for a week and he's still too scared. So I'm doing it."

"Kid," Fergus said weakly.

"You can say the end part."

She turned to me.

"Dr. Luna. You came in here when you were green. He gave you toast. You fixed my stomach on a placemat. You fixed a lot of kids. You live upstairs now, and Bean lives upstairs, and you made the pancakes better."

She took a breath.

"He wants to marry you. I want you to be my aunt for real, not kind of. Will you?"

She opened the box and set it on the table in front of me.

A plain gold ring with one small stone.

The cabbies at the counter had turned around on their stools.

I looked at Fergus.

His eyes were very bright.

"That was the end part," Ciara hissed at him.

"Luna," he said. "Marry me. Together. Not halfway."

"Yes," I said.

The nurse at the counter burst into tears.

One cabby started clapping, and the relief cook banged a spatula on the grill.

Ciara climbed onto the booth and hugged us both at once, with the baby squashed between us, and the baby woke and screamed about it.

We got married in the diner on the first Saturday in February.

One of the counter cops got himself ordained online for it.

He took it very seriously and practiced his lines on the produce men.

The Kitchen families came.

The milk boy came in a clip-on tie.

The runner came with her new running club, and the young father brought his daughter, who was walking now.

My landlady sat in the front booth.

Her cat watched from her window across the street.

I wore a white dress with long sleeves and small buttons down the back, from a thrift store on Passyunk Avenue.

Fergus wore a new navy suit that actually fit, because Ciara had dragged him to buy it.

The baby wore yellow.

Ciara held the rings and the sign-up clipboard at the same time, out of habit.

We stood in front of the grill.

The cop read the vows off an index card.

Then he let us say our own.

"Your toast is on the house for life," Fergus said. "I said it the first night. I'm saying it again in front of witnesses."

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