I Blessed Her Wedding With My Life novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Not in a Patrol Car

Jo walks out through two hundred phones with Anson and her aunt Dot, and learns that no order ever locked her door.

The deputy reached me before I could breathe.

His hand closed around my left arm, right over the scars.

"Ma'am, drop the knife."

"I already put it down," I said. "She picked it up."

The knife lay on the floor between Tilda's white shoes, in a small red puddle.

Nobody looked at it.

Everybody looked at my hand, which was dripping on the carpet.

Mom took the microphone off its stand.

"Everyone, please stay calm," she said, and her voice shook in exactly the right places.

"My daughter has not been well for a long time."

"She did this to herself once before. Tonight she hurt her sister."

A woman at table four covered her mouth.

Somebody else whispered, "That's the sister who tried to kill herself," and I felt the whole room lean away from me.

The doctor from table one was already standing.

"I can sign an emergency hold right now," he said, and patted his jacket pocket. "Seventy-two hours. Deputy, if you'd escort her."

The deputy's grip tightened.

For three years that sentence had lived in my mother's mouth.

If you leave, they'll bring you back.

Now it was being said by two men in front of two hundred people, and my feet would not move.

"Take your hand off her."

The voice came from behind me, low and flat.

Anson walked across the dance floor in his navy suit and stopped between me and the deputy.

He was taller than I remembered, with gray coming in at his temples.

"Sir, this is a family matter," the deputy said.

"Then take your hand off the family."

"Anson," Davis's father said from the head table, in the voice of a man ending a meeting. "Sit down."

"No."

It was the only word Anson said to him, and Mr. Prescott's face went hard as a plate.

The deputy looked at my mother.

I watched her decide whether to nod.

Then a chair scraped at table nine, and a woman in a wide green coat stood up with her handbag on her arm.

I knew that coat.

I had not seen it since my father's funeral.

"Hollis's sister is here," Aunt Dot announced to the ballroom, "and I'd like to know why my niece is bleeding on a rented carpet."

"Dorothea, you were not invited," Mom said.

"The groom's brother invited me. I'm a guest, Helena. I brought a gift."

She marched across the floor, took a cloth napkin off the nearest table, and wrapped it around my hand before anyone could stop her.

"Hold it above your heart," she said. "That's a deep one. It needs stitches, and it needs them tonight."

"She needs an evaluation first," the doctor said.

"She needs a needle and thread," Dot said without turning around. "I worked thirty years in an emergency room. You can sign your paper after I've sewn her up, if you can find a judge."

A few people laughed, nervously.

It was the first sound in that room that wasn't on my mother's side.

I looked around me.

Every phone was pointed at my face, and every one was recording.

For three years nobody outside that house had seen me at all.

I realized I did not have to be quiet for them.

"I'm walking out of this room," I said.

"Anyone who wants to stop me can do it on camera."

The deputy's hand went slack on my arm.

He looked at the phones.

Then he looked at my mother, who had stopped smiling.

"Let her go, then," Mom said into the microphone, sweetly, so the back row could hear. "Let her see how far she gets. She has no money, no phone and no friends."

"She has a car," Anson said.

He took my good hand, the right one, and I walked out.

Behind me Tilda was sobbing into Davis's shoulder.

Just before the doors swung shut I looked back.

She wasn't looking at me.

She was staring at the cut on her own palm, and her face had gone the color of the cake.

Outside, the night air hit me like cold water.

It was the first time in three years I had stood outdoors without someone's hand on my elbow.

Anson opened the passenger door of a gray sedan, and I got in with Dot's napkin soaking through.

Dot slid into the back seat, and Anson pulled out of the lot before the doors of the club could open.

My hand began to shake.

"Breathe," Dot said, and put her palm flat on my shoulder from behind. "In through the nose."

"She'll have the deputy at the house," I said. "She'll have the paper by morning. She said they'd bring me back."

"Josephine."

Dot's voice was very quiet.

"On Monday I phoned the county courthouse, because somebody at church told me you were being kept at home."

"I asked the clerk if there was a commitment order on you."

"I asked her three times."

The lights on the lake road slid across her glasses.

"There has never been an order, honey. Not one. No court has ever ordered you to stay anywhere."

I stared at her.

"The door was never locked," she said. "Nobody ever locked it but your mother."

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