Mom Let Me Marry the Security Guard novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Eleven Minutes Married

Margo freezes Claire's cards and dumps her paintings on the curb. Ethan loads every canvas. They marry as a one-year deal with separate beds, and Bridget films it. Margo says it won't last the week.

Ethan's flat was one small bedroom over a laundromat, and it smelled of dryer sheets.

He gave me his only bed and said he would take the floor.

I did not sleep.

At two in the morning my phone buzzed with a bank alert: my debit card had been declined at a vending machine downstairs.

I had tried to buy a bottle of water.

Every card I owned had been frozen.

My mother had said by morning, and she had meant it by midnight.

At six I called the studio landlord to ask for ten minutes to collect my brushes.

"The lease is in your mother's name, Miss Penhallow," he said. "She had the locks changed at five."

I put on the same cream dress and Ethan's black jacket and took a cab with the last cash in my clutch.

Ethan came with me without being asked.

We turned the corner onto my street, and I stopped walking.

My paintings were on the curb.

Eleven years of work were stacked against a lamppost like old doors.

My mother had hired movers to carry them out at dawn, so the whole street would see.

A woman in a bathrobe stood on her stoop with a coffee and watched.

A man walking a dog slowed down to read the labels on the canvases.

"Is that the Ridgeway winner?" he said. "She's selling it off the sidewalk?"

"Look," the woman said. "It's the girl from the video."

Somebody's phone came up.

I stood there in last night's dress and could not make my feet move.

Ethan stepped past me.

He did not say a word to the neighbors.

He lifted the largest canvas, the one of my father's boat, and carried it to the white van he had parked at the corner.

He came back for the next one.

He wrapped each frame in a gray moving blanket from the back of the van and set it down.

The man with the dog stopped filming.

"Hey," he said. "Do you need a hand?"

"Yes," Ethan said.

By eight o'clock the paintings were in the van, and the curb was bare.

I had not cried once, and that was the only thing I was proud of.

I sat in the passenger seat with my hands in my lap.

"You don't have to do the county office," I said. "You've done enough."

"I said I would."

"Why? You don't know me."

"I know she did that to you in front of three hundred people," he said, and he looked at the road. "That's enough."

I did not believe it was the whole answer, but I had nobody else to ask.

The county office had a line, a ticking clock, and a clerk with a sticker of a cat on her badge.

We filled out the forms on a clipboard chained to a counter.

Where it asked for occupation, he wrote security.

Where it asked for my last name, I wrote Penhallow and stared at it for a long time.

"One year," I said, in the hall, while we waited for our number.

"One year of what?"

"A marriage on paper. Separate beds. You keep your life, I keep mine. When it's over, we sign and nobody owes anybody."

"And in front of your family?"

"You don't touch me unless it's needed for show."

He nodded once.

"Those terms are fine," he said. "I won't ask for more."

I had expected him to bargain, and he did not.

That should have bothered me more than it did.

A clerk called our number.

We said the words in under four minutes, with a janitor and a woman in a tracksuit as our witnesses.

When the clerk said I could kiss him, he only held out his hand.

I shook it.

Then I heard a little laugh behind us, bright and sweet.

My sister stood at the top of the steps outside with her phone held up and her eyes wet.

"Oh, Claire," Bridget said. "I just had to see it for myself."

"Mom wanted proof. This is going to be so sad for everyone."

She was filming us coming out of the door in our wedding clothes, a cream party dress and a security jacket.

"Delete that," I said.

"It's already posted." She tilted her head and gave me a trembling smile. "I love you. I'm only doing what Mom asked."

She ran down the steps to a waiting car before I could say anything.

Ethan took the phone out of my hand, because I had been about to throw it, and put it back in my clutch.

"Not worth the screen," he said.

We stood on the steps of the county office, married less than fifteen minutes.

My phone rang.

It was my mother.

I put her on speaker, because I wanted him to hear it too.

"Congratulations, Mrs. Rudd," Margo said. "I saw the video."

"Enjoy the one-bedroom over the laundromat."

"It will not last the week."

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