Married to My Ex-Father-in-Law novel · Chapter 31 of 32
Chapter 31: Her Own Name
I looked at the ring for a long time.
Then I closed the velvet box over it, gently, with his fingers still around it.
"Tomorrow," I said. "Put it on me tomorrow. In front of everybody."
He nodded.
He kissed my forehead, the way Nonna does, like a stamp.
Then he went back out the front door, and the bell rang behind him.
On Sunday, the last Sunday of September, I got married in my grandmother's backyard.
I didn't wear the 1963 dress.
Nonna said so herself, on Friday, with the garment bag in her arms.
"That one's been to one wedding for love and one for a table," she said. "Buy your own."
I bought my own.
It was red. Dark red silk, to the knee, with sleeves to the elbow, from a shop on the Plaza that had never had a dentist in it before.
I paid for it with my own card, and Carmela made the saleswoman take a picture of me signing the slip.
At eleven o'clock the yard on Holmes Street was full.
Sixty wooden chairs between the tomatoes and the brick wall, and people standing behind them in the alley.
The shoe repair couple. The plumber in a tie. The old ladies from the social club in hats.
The credit union loan officer. The lady whose dentures I relined every spring.
The two old men from the table and their wives, in the second row, the Saint Anthony medal pinned on a navy dress.
The girl from Tulsa, who'd come up again on the Greyhound and sat with Carmela's mother.
The detective in a sport coat, holding a coffee, standing by the fig tree.
And in the front row on the aisle, in her dark blue dress, the driver's mother.
The string lights were on even in daylight, because the plumber said they should be.
The priest stood under the grape arbor in his vestments, looking at the clothesline.
Carmela's boy went first with the pillow.
He walked down the path between the tomatoes so slowly the old ladies started laughing.
He got to the arbor, and he didn't throw it.
He handed it to Dom with both hands, very seriously.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of Married to My Ex-Father-in-Law are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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