Not His Wife novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: Saint Brigid's

The parish secretary handed me the booking card in the church office, and I read it standing up.

It was soft at the corners, the same kind of card as before.

This one was in my own handwriting.

"Tolbert and Boylston," it said. "Saturday, two o'clock."

Under it, on the line for the deposit, I had written a check for two hundred dollars, and signed my own name.

"We keep these twenty years," the secretary said. "Would you like it back after?"

"Please."

"Nobody ever asks," she said, and wiped her glasses with a smile.

Bernice found me in the vestibule with the veil pinned crooked.

She wore the navy hat and a new silk dress the color of plums.

She looked me up and down.

"Hold still."

She fixed the pin with two fingers and stepped back.

"Alyssa took the plea on Friday," she said, low. "Three years. I won't say another word about it today."

"Thank you."

"Your mother would've cried."

"I know."

"So I'm crying for her. Walk."

The doors opened.

Sixty people stood up in the pews.

They were the same sixty who had come the first time, in the same brick church, with the same organ.

The ones who had known nothing had come to see me properly married.

The ones who had known something had come to say sorry with their faces.

Joyce sat in the last pew, alone, in her gray coat.

She did not meet my eye, and I nodded to her once as I passed.

Reed had not come.

The woman from Cleveland sat on the aisle, in the green raincoat, with her hands in her lap.

The kid in the headphones had a camera, and the records clerk had a hat.

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