My Husband Played Stranger, So I Took Off the Ring novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: A Real Wedding

My mother was sitting up when we came in, with her hair brushed and her lipstick on.

She had never worn lipstick in a nursing home in her life.

"There they are," she said, and her oxygen tube hissed. "The runaways."

"Hi, Mom."

"Come here, let me look at you."

I bent down and she took my face in her thin cold hands and studied it.

"You've been crying."

"I haven't."

"You look like your grandmother when she'd been crying and was too stubborn to say so." She let me go and turned her sharp grey eyes on Nate. "And you, Sunday boy. Sit. You're standing like a coat rack."

Nate sat on the edge of the visitor chair.

"Mrs. Larkin."

"What did we agree about that?"

"Rita."

"Better." She looked at his arm. "What happened to your arm?"

"I work in a dish pit now."

"Tell me everything."

He told her.

He told her about the hose, and the eleven plates, and the two women who laughed at him, and the bucket.

By the end my mother was laughing so hard she had to hold the blanket against her chest.

"Sixteen dollars an hour," she said, wiping her eyes. "My daughter married a man who washes plates for sixteen dollars an hour, and he's the best thing that's happened to him."

"Mom."

"I'm only saying what the night nurse said, and she's never wrong. She owes me twenty dollars now, by the way. I told her you'd find out by the next election."

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