The Bride Ran, So I Wore Her Crown and Married the Valley's Don novel · Chapter 10 of 24
Chapter 10: The Handshake
The Growers' Table met on the second Tuesday of the month in the church hall, with a white cloth and forty chairs.
I had not been asked to sit at it, and I came anyway, in the plain navy dress I wear for funerals.
My husband said nothing in the car.
He drove with his eyes on the vineyard rows, and his glove sat heavy on the wheel.
"I won't take it off," he said, at the church door.
"I haven't asked you to."
"I know you haven't. That is why I'm saying it."
He went in ahead of me, and the hall went quiet in the way it did for him.
They were growers and packers and brokers, old men with big hands and a few widows who farmed their husbands' land.
They stood when he came in, and they sat when he sat.
I took the chair at his right.
Garo Boghosian was already at the far end with a loaf of bread on a board in front of him.
He let the soup go around, and the lamb.
When the plates were cleared, he stood.
"Gentlemen. Ladies," he said, in Armenian, and the room settled. "A peace is not a peace until it is sealed. My grandfather sealed his with the Kasparians' grandfather over a loaf, with two bare hands on the bread."
An old grower murmured, "That's so."
"We have signed papers. We have a wedding." Garo spread his hands. "But a man who keeps his hand hidden at his own treaty is a man who is keeping something back."
The room had turned toward my husband.
He did not move.
"The glove stays," he said, in the slow voice.
"Then the treaty is a lie," Garo said, "and the Boghosian trucks go home."
I heard a chair scrape.
Half the men at the table were looking at their plates, and the other half were looking at Vahan Kasparian's left hand.
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