My Ex Is Engaged to My Stepsister, and I'm Still His Wife novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Chapel

The chapel was smaller than I remembered and the sign was bigger.

It stood on a hillside above the Parkway, a white board-and-batten building with a steeple the size of a mailbox.

Over the door the neon heart was switched off, and under it, in blue script, the tubes said COME AS YOU ARE.

I stood in the gravel lot on Saturday afternoon with my hands in my coat pockets.

Josiah stood on my left, a half step back, in his good dark overcoat.

"This is where he tore it up," I said.

"Where?"

"There. By the dumpster. The wind went that way."

Josiah looked at the dumpster and at the empty sky beyond it, and he said nothing.

The office door had a bell on it.

A woman sat at the desk behind the counter, in a sequined vest.

It was red now, not gold, and her hair had gone white, and she wore reading glasses on a beaded chain.

She was seventy if she was a day.

She looked up over the glasses, and her whole face opened.

"Well, I'll be," she said. "The crying-laughing kids."

I could not make a sound.

"You," she said, and pointed at me. "You got mascara on your collar. And your boy sang that Elvis song flat the whole way through. I told my husband that night, I said, those two are going to be on the radio."

"We were," I said. "He was."

"I know it, honey. I've been hearing about your fifty-dollar chapel for two years." She took off her glasses. "I figured you'd be back about the paperwork."

Josiah's hand settled at the small of my back, and I leaned into it.

"Sugar, I remember every one," the lady said. "Forty years. I've never lost a folder."

She pulled a green cloth ledger out of the bottom drawer and laid it on the counter and turned the pages with a wet fingertip.

"October the sixteenth," she said. "There."

She turned it around.

The page was ruled in columns.

In the fifth line, in her handwriting, it said: Satterfield, Colton J. / Dunavant, Marlee A. Full Package. $50. Mailed.

Beside it were two signatures in blue ink.

One was a young man's loop, wide and showy.

The other one was mine.

I had signed it with the little star I used to put over the i in Marlee.

I laughed.

It started small, and I put my hand over my mouth, and it came out anyway, and then I was holding on to the counter.

I laughed until I couldn't stand, and I sat down on the lobby bench, and the laughing turned into something else.

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