Chapter 4: Mrs. Bertolini

We were married on Friday at noon, in the rose garden behind the house.

There were thirty chairs on the lawn and a judge in a grey suit who had been told not to ask me anything.

Teresa had found me the dress.

It was plain ivory silk with long sleeves, and the sleeves covered the marks on my wrists.

"I wasn't laughing, you know," she said, doing up the buttons down my back. "At the dinner."

"I saw."

"I should have stood up."

"You didn't have to."

She turned me around by the shoulders and looked me over with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

"Whatever you think my brother is," she said, "he's worse and better. Mostly better. Don't let him hear me say it."

Luca Ferrante walked me across the grass because I had nobody else.

He said nothing the whole way.

At the end of the aisle Dario stood waiting in a black suit.

He watched me the whole way, and he did not look at anyone else.

I watched the capos in the first rows as I walked.

Five old men in dark jackets, the family's council, who had known me since I was a child carrying my mother's trays.

Two of them nodded at me.

Three of them didn't look at me at all.

They looked at the gate at the back of the garden.

I noticed it and put it away with the other things.

Then I was beside Dario and the judge was speaking.

My hand was in his, and it wasn't cold this time.

"Do you, Dario Bertolini, take this woman."

"I do."

He said it before the judge had finished the sentence, and one of the cousins laughed under her breath.

"Do you, Elise Gomez."

"I do."

"The ring," the judge said.

Dario took my left hand.

The band he slid onto it was plain gold, and heavy, and it fit.

He turned my hand over and pressed his lips once to the red mark on my wrist, where the sleeve had slipped.

"Then by the power vested in me," the judge began.

The gate banged open.

Stefano came down the side of the lawn with two of his friends behind him, and he wasn't wearing a jacket.

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