Chapter 24: Which Brother

At 3:40 on Saturday, I stood in the test kitchen in a white dress and looked at my bouquet.

It was made of tomatoes.

"They're heirlooms," Marcy said. "It's a callback."

"They're fruit."

"They're a callback made of fruit. Hold them low, they're heavy."

Four hundred folding chairs waited upstairs on the roof, and a harpist had been tuning for forty minutes.

Marcy had given me a clipboard with the order of events, and I had read it twice and found that I had no objections.

I considered writing a memo about that.

The kitchen door opened, and Sal came in with a flat package under one arm, wrapped in brown paper.

He was wearing a tux, and the blanket was nowhere.

"I took something from your husband's apron on Thursday," he said. "He hangs it on a hook in a kitchen I own."

"The certificate."

"I know a good frame shop."

He unwrapped it.

The blue border and the gold seal sat behind clean glass, in a frame of dark wood.

Nadia Bell and Victor D. Aston, it said. Husband and Wife.

"Anyone can lose paper," Sal said. "A frame is harder to lose. I'll hang it where you can see it from the kitchen."

I hugged him around the package, and he held on a long time.

"I've always known which one was which," he said into my hair. "I only wanted them to find out for themselves."

"You could have said."

"I'm a father. I did say. I said it by making tea."

Domenic stood in the doorway in a charcoal suit.

He had a tie on, and he had an index card in his hand, and he was not quite meeting my eyes.

"I have a question," he said. "I'll ask it out loud."

"Go ahead."

"Would you let me walk you down? I understand if you'd rather not."

I thought about it.

I thought about a restaurant, a lobby, a ring in a box.

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