He Lost His Place Protecting Me, So I Took the Whole Family novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Forty Days
At her husband's forty-day table Ermal claims the widow by the old law with his hand on her neck, and Drita walks the length of the hall, asks Luan for his word, and lays her widow's scarf on Ermal's plate.
Ermal asked for me with a lamb rib in his hand.
He said it to the whole table, with his mouth full, forty days after we buried his brother.
"By the old law the house keeps its widow," he said. "I'll take her home tonight."
Eighty people were eating in the banquet hall, and nobody put down a fork.
Ardian's photograph stood at the head of the table beside a lit candle.
He looked kind in it, and he looked tired.
I was twenty-seven, and I had worn black for forty days, down to the scarf pinned under my chin.
Ermal's free hand came up and closed on the back of my neck.
It was hot and damp, and he squeezed, and he did not let go.
"Say thank you to your family, Drita," he said.
At the head of the table Ardian's father nodded and kept chewing.
The old man had buried a son six weeks ago, and he was handing me to the other one over the lamb.
My neck hurt where Ermal's thumb was.
I looked down the long table, past the aunts with their eyes on their plates.
One man in the hall was not eating.
Luan Prenga sat at the far end by the door, in a dark suit, with his hands flat on the cloth.
He had stood beside Ardian at our wedding.
In two years he had never said more to me than good morning.
I knew one more law, and it was not Ermal's.
My mother's mountain people kept a second law, older than the first.
A woman could put her hand on any man's wrist before the whole table and say, "Your word."
If he stood and answered, "My word is on her," she was under his roof for a year and a day.
No other man could touch her or take her out of it, and whoever broke that word answered with his life.
I had never seen it done.
I had heard it told once, at a christening, as a joke.
I took Ermal's hand off my neck and put it on his plate.
"Don't," he said.
I walked down the length of the hall.
The only sound was my heels on the floor, and a spoon someone dropped in the kitchen.
Luan watched me come.
He did not look at the floor this time.
I stopped beside his chair and closed my hand around his wrist, over the cuff.
His pulse was going hard under my fingers, and his skin was hot.
"Your word," I said.
He stood up.
He was a head taller than I was, and he smelled of cold air and cedar.
"My word is on her," he said. "For a year and a day."
His voice was lower than I remembered.
Somebody at the table said his name, and then the room started to breathe again.
At the head of the table the old man put his fork down and gripped the knob of his cane.
"Luan," Zef Gjoka said. "You know what this costs."
He did not sound angry.
His sister Lule sat at his elbow, small and gray in her black cardigan.
She looked at Luan, and then at me.
Then she looked at her plate.
"I know what it costs," Luan said.
"Your seat at this table," the old man said. "Your rooms. Your cut. Tonight, all of it."
"Yes."
"Nobody in this family will speak to you," the old man said.
"Yes."
Ermal laughed, loud and wet, and shoved his chair back.
"He'll be on a roof with the Montenegrins by Monday," he said. "And you'll come crawling back, Drita. The word runs out."
"In a year and a day," I said.
"I can wait a year."
He smiled at me with the lamb still on his teeth.
I reached up and took the scarf off my head.
It had been pinned there forty days, and my hair came down around my face.
I folded the black cloth once, in half, the way my mother folded a tablecloth.
I walked back up the hall in front of eighty people and laid it on Ermal's plate, on top of the bones.
Then I went out the double doors with Luan Prenga behind me, and nobody at that table said a word.
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