My Father Married Me to the Man I Watched Shoot Someone, and the Only Witness Is His Wife novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The First Dance
In the Kralj supper club hall she sets her terms in his ear, he gives her a year, her father toasts, and Xander drives her north without looking at the water.
The Kralj supper club had been cleared for the wedding, and four hundred candles burned in the windows over the harbor.
He walked me onto the floor in front of everyone.
He did not ask.
His hand settled at the small of my back and the other took mine, and he turned me into the first dance.
I had thought the hand would hurt.
It was only heavy and warm.
"You have a steady voice," he said, looking over my head.
"It's my job," I said.
"You are the court reporter."
"I'm the one who writes it down."
"Yes," he said.
"So I gather."
We turned past the long head table.
Baba Stana, his grandmother, sat at the center of it in black, eighty-one years old, with her hearing aids turned off.
She raised her glass to me and drank.
"Say what you want," Xander Kralj said quietly.
"All of it.
"Once."
I had practiced it in the vestry mirror just before the choir began.
"A lock on the inside of my bedroom door," I said.
"Mine, not yours.
"I'm not spoken to like a debt, by you or your cousin or anyone who works for you."
He said nothing, so I went on.
"And I write down everything that is said to me, in any room, for as long as I'm in your house."
"Why?" he said.
"Because it's the only way I know to stay alive."
His hand moved on my back.
It was not a caress, just a change of weight, as if he were setting a load.
"Is that a threat?" he asked.
"It's a habit."
For the first time he looked at me.
His eyes were so dark I could not find the edge of the pupil.
"Not here," he said.
"No."
"I mean, we are not discussing it here, Mrs. Kralj," he said.
"Not in front of four hundred people and your father."
"My father's the one who sold me," I said.
"I know who sold you."
He said it flatly.
He turned me, and the room blurred past, and I saw my father at the bar with the priest, laughing, his hand on a bottle.
I saw the cousin with the shaved head watching me from the doorway, rolling the toothpick between his teeth.
I saw a dozen men in black suits with their backs to the walls.
"You have a year," Xander said.
My feet missed a step, and he held me up.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It means you are my wife for a year.
"You will have your lock.
"No one will speak to you as a debt in my house.
"Write what you like."
"And after a year?" I said.
"After a year we speak about it again," he said.
"You haven't said what you'll do about what I saw," I said.
"No," he said.
"I haven't."
The song ended.
The room applauded, and he bowed his head to me, and I felt the cold of the silence between us under the noise.
My father came across the floor with his arms open.
"My girl," he said.
He kissed my forehead and held my face in both his hands.
His palms were damp.
"You look like your mother," he said.
"You look beautiful."
He turned to the room and lifted a glass.
"To the Kralj and the Petrovic," he said, "and thirty years of peace on the water."
The room drank.
Xander's hand closed on my elbow.
He drank nothing.
"Excuse us," he said to my father, pleasantly.
He walked me out through the kitchen, past men who stepped back, down a service stair and into a cold black lot where a car waited with its engine running.
His cousin held the back door.
"Ilija," Xander said.
"Stay with the guests.
"I'll drive her myself."
"The family should," Ilija began.
"I'll drive her," Xander said.
I got in.
The car smelled of leather and cold, and the heater was already on.
Xander took the driver's seat, and the lot's one light slid across his face and off again.
We went down the hill toward the harbor road.
Below us the lake lay black and the ore docks stood up in rows of lights.
The number-three slip was out there somewhere on the left, under its lamp.
I turned my head and looked at it.
I wanted to see it when he drove by.
He did not look.
His eyes stayed on the road, his hands on the wheel, the steel watch on his right wrist catching the dash light.
He drove by the water as though it were not there.
At the lights he said, without turning his head, "You wrote the time."
"Eleven twenty-two," I said.
"Yes," he said.
"It was."
The light changed.
We turned north, away from the city, onto the lake road.
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