Skipped by the Altar, Taken by His Uncle novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Ten-Forty Again
He didn't read ahead.
He tried, once, two nights before, when he thought I was in the shower.
I came out with my hair in a towel and found him standing at the old desk with the drawer half open and the reading glasses in his hand.
He shut the drawer.
"I was looking for a pen," he said.
"There's never a pen in that desk."
"I know," he said miserably. "I put it back."
He put both hands in the air and backed away from the desk.
I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the floor.
We were married again on the first Friday in December, at 10:40, at the same window.
It snowed a little that morning, the first of the year, and melted the second it touched Court Street.
I wore the pale blue sundress for the third time, with my mother's pearl earrings and her old wool coat over the top.
Connie did my hair in the bathroom at the lockkeeper's house and stuck a pen through the knot.
"You'll want it," she said. "You always want one."
I got to City Hall at 10:15.
The clerk was already laughing.
"Nine fifty-eight," she said through the window. "He beat his own record. He asked me if it was too early again."
"What did you say?"
"I said, 'Mayor, it's your building.'"
The hallway was full.
The barber was there in a tie. The baker had flour on her good coat. The bar owner, the waitress and her kids, the old man from the shoe repair in a hat I'd never seen him take off.
The football team stood along the far wall, because somebody had told them there'd be cake.
The Courier's publisher stood by the stairs with a pad, taking notes himself.
My phone was in Connie's hand, held up so my mother and my aunt could see from Phoenix.
And Reuben was on the same wooden bench.
White shirt. Sleeves down, buttoned at the wrists. The cracked watch.
A bouquet across his knees, wrapped in newspaper.
In December there's no farmers' market, so it was zinnias he'd dried in the boathouse since September, and a few stems of basil from a pot on the windowsill.
He stood up when he saw me.
He didn't say anything at all.
"Pritchard and Eckert?" the clerk called.
Two of us stood up.
So did the whole hallway.
Earl stood up off the bench beside Reuben with his cane.
He'd worn a new tie. It was worse than the old one.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Skipped by the Altar, Taken by His Uncle are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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