The Taste of My Husband's Brother (A Wife's Revenge) novel · Chapter 32 of 32
Chapter 32: The Last Barrel
Lise did the cake.
It took her the whole six weeks and most of her sanity.
It had three tiers, white icing, and a ring of tiny sugar peppers around every layer, red and green, alternating.
She made forty-one sugar peppers before she got one she liked.
She ate the other forty.
"Never again," she said, the night before, with icing in her eyebrows. "If you two ever get divorced, you're getting a sheet cake from Walmart."
"We're not getting divorced."
"Then I'll never have to make another one. Everybody wins."
We were married on the last Sunday in September, on Mémère's lawn, under the old oak.
The same oak where Luc had set his little table with the silver pen.
Nobody mentioned that.
Everybody thought it.
The whole island came.
The pickers, the bottling crew, the barn crew, the women from accounts.
The receptionist cried before anything happened at all.
The great-aunts came from the mainland in matching hats.
The foreman's daughter drew the programs, with our pepper on the front.
I wore a white cotton dress and my mother's earrings, and no shoes, because the lawn was soft and it was my wedding.
Etienne wore a gray suit he'd bought in Lafayette and kept tugging at, as if it were going to bite him.
He looked at me coming across the grass.
The priest married us.
He looked right at me the whole time.
When he said, "You may kiss the bride," Etienne kissed me so long that the old shrimper yelled, "She's not going anywhere, cher!"
Then the bells on the bottling house rang, and somebody's uncle started up the accordion, and it was a party.
Crawfish on newspaper down three long tables.
Lise's cake under the oak.
The kids running in the dusk with sparklers.
When the toasts came, Mémère stood up.
It took her a while, with the cane.
Nobody helped her.
Nobody would have dared.
She held up her glass of champagne and looked down the long table at all of us.
"A year ago this month," she said, "I was going to sign my island away to a man with very white teeth."
The whole lawn laughed.
"I want to thank the people who stopped me." She pointed her glass at Lise. "The one who kicked the printer."
Lise stood up and took a bow.
"The ones who gave up their Sundays, and a gold tooth." She pointed her glass at the bottling crew, and they cheered.
"And my grandson," she said, "who finally, at thirty-six years old, learned to say what he means out loud."
Etienne put his face in his hand.
"And my taster." She looked at me, and her black eyes were wet. "Who told me no, more than once. Every time she was right."
She raised her glass higher.
"To the taster," she said. "And the man with dirt on his hands. Now somebody get me my cigarette."
Two hundred people drank.
We danced until midnight.
Etienne can't dance.
He did it anyway, in his socks, on the grass, with the whole island watching and Lise yelling advice.
At midnight the bottling crew lined the shell road with their trucks, headlights on, all the way to the camp.
We drove through them with the windows down and two hundred people honking.
The camp was quiet.
He'd strung little white lights along the new porch screens.
The marsh was loud with frogs.
He carried me up the steps, which he'd been threatening to do for six weeks, and hit my head on the door frame.
"Sorry. Sorry."
"You've had a year to measure that door."
"I've been busy," he said. "I was getting married."
He set me down inside.
He shut the door behind us.
I put my hand flat on his chest, the way I had in the hallway in the storm.
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