He Chose Mistress, I Chose Empire novel · Chapter 32 of 32
Chapter 32: Empire
I counted them from the window, the way my father taught me to count anything that mattered.
Thirty.
Every truck Kitt owned, washed and lined up nose to tail from my gate to the bridge.
The last eight had come off the dealer's lot on Thursday, for the second hospital.
Their drivers stood beside them in clean red shirts, drinking coffee in the early light.
Wilma came through the office door without knocking, already in her good blue dress and her steel-toed boots.
"Don't look at me like that," she said. "I asked them to park in the lot. They said no."
"Whose idea was it?"
"The oldest one. He said your daddy lined up all nine trucks the day you were born. Out on this same road."
I hadn't known that.
"Get dressed, honey," Wilma said. "You're getting married at eleven, and I want you to eat a biscuit first."
At ten forty-five I walked out to the gate in a plain white dress and my mother's pearls.
Wilma was holding the keys to Truck Four.
"You're driving," she said. "I'm riding."
I climbed up into the cab with my skirt bunched in one fist.
I turned the key.
I pulled out of the gate and drove slowly down the line of thirty trucks.
As I passed each one, the driver reached in and leaned on the horn.
Thirty air horns went off one after another, all the way down the river road.
Then I backed Truck Four into Bay Two without touching anything.
Wilma looked at me sideways.
"Coffee can," she said.
The warehouse floor had been swept until you could see the old cotton-press marks in the concrete.
Two hundred folding chairs. Moving blankets hung on the brick walls. Strings of lights from the freight elevator to the bay doors.
At the front, under the KITT sign, stood the Steinway.
The church choir had brought it back that morning on our own piano board, in the church van.
The chairs were full.
My crew and their families. The charge nurse and half the NICU night shift.
The twins' mother with both girls on her lap in matching dresses.
The hospital CEO. The old council member with the cane, holding a framed crayon drawing on his knees.
The detective, in a dress instead of a raincoat. My lawyer, already crying.
The choir began to sing.
Wilma put my hand through her arm.
"Your daddy would want me to say something here," she said. "I'm not going to. I'll cry."
We walked down the aisle between the folding chairs.
Jubal's daughter went first, in a yellow dress and her pink rain boots.
She carried the rings on her red clipboard, taped down so they wouldn't roll.
Jubal stood at the front in a navy suit that fit.
His tie had little cartoon trucks on it.
He watched me walk the whole way, and he didn't try to hide what was on his face.
Wilma put my hand in his.
"You drop her," she told him, "I'll run you over with a twenty-six-footer."
"Yes, ma'am."
The preacher from the choir's church kept it short, because I'd asked her to.
Jubal's vows were three lines long. Bug had edited them.
"I'll keep the receipts," he said. "I'll fix what breaks. I'll never put a flag on a page."
Mine were shorter.
"I read this one all the way through before I said yes," I said. "I'd sign it again."
His daughter handed up the rings and checked them off her clipboard.
When the preacher said he could kiss me, he took his time about it.
Thirty drivers whooped.
Somebody out in the lot leaned on a horn, and then all of them did.
We danced on the warehouse floor under the strings of lights, to the choir and the Steinway.
He was still a better dancer than a man his size had any right to be.
At midnight the last car pulled out through the gate.
His daughter had left at nine with her grandmother, asleep in the back seat with her clipboard.
The building was dark except for the exit signs.
Jubal took my hand and led me up the stairwell, past the second floor, past the third and the fourth.
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