My Groom Never Showed, So I Cursed Him for Eleven Months novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Forty Minutes
Forty minutes at the altar, the best man announces her groom robbed the boss in the front pew and ran, and she puts her ring in the boss's hand and takes the bus in her dress.
I stood at the altar for forty minutes before anyone said the word late.
The organist had played the same hymn three times.
My father kept turning around in the front pew to look at the doors.
Two hundred people sat behind him, and every one of them was looking at the doors with him.
I wasn't.
I was looking at the first pew on the groom's side.
It was the only place in the church where somebody wasn't staring at the doors.
My groom had no family left.
He had asked his boss to sit where a father would sit, and his boss had filled the whole side with men in dark suits.
His boss was Donal Dalton.
Everyone in town knew the name and lowered their voice to say it.
My father paid him every month to keep the bar open.
He sat in that pew with his hands folded and his grey eyes on me.
He had not looked at his watch once.
He did not look away when I caught him at it.
My cousin was holding my phone in the second row, and I had asked for it back twice.
I knew the last text by heart.
It came at 7:12 that morning.
Blue socks on. Ambrose is here with the car. See you at the end of the aisle.
I had laughed at that.
Cormac wore blue socks for luck on every big day of his life, and nobody had ever seen them but me.
At 10:40 the door beside the sacristy banged open.
Ambrose Teller came in out of breath, with his trouser legs wet to the knee and a raw scrape across his knuckles.
He was Cormac's best man, and he was alone.
He walked up the three steps and stood so close to me that I smelled the car wash on his shoes.
"Dahl," he said. "I'm so sorry."
He turned to face the church.
"He called me at six this morning," Ambrose said loudly.
"He said he took the money out of Mr. Dalton's safe and he couldn't go through with it."
Nobody breathed.
"Three hundred eighty thousand dollars. He's gone. He got on a bus and he's gone."
A low sound went through the church, two hundred people drawing in a breath.
My father got to his feet.
"He ran," he said. "Dahl, the boy ran."
"He didn't," I said.
My voice came out small, so I said it again.
"He texted me at 7:12. He said you were there with the car, Ambrose."
Ambrose looked at me with his whole sad face.
"I offered to drive him, kid. He called at six and said forget it. He told you that so you wouldn't worry."
"Listen to Ambrose," my father said.
I looked at the pews.
Two hundred faces were looking at me with pity, and I had never been so angry in my life.
In the first pew on the groom's side, Donal Dalton stood up.
His men stood up with him, all at once.
He said nothing to Ambrose.
He said nothing to me.
He turned his head toward my father.
"Take her home, Brendan," he said.
That was all.
He had looked at me for forty minutes, and the only thing he had to say was to my father.
I looked down at the ring.
Cormac had saved eleven months to buy it, with a small diamond and a thin gold band.
I worked it over my knuckle, which hurt, and I pulled it off.
I walked down the three steps in my mother's dress, past the flowers and the white ribbons on the pews.
I crossed the aisle to the man in the first pew.
Up close he was taller than I had thought, with a burn scar running down the back of his left wrist and forearm.
I took his hand and turned it over and put the ring in his palm.
"It's worth about four thousand," I said. "Count it against the rest."
He did not answer.
His hand was hot, and his fingers closed slowly over the ring.
His eyes didn't leave mine.
I turned and walked up the aisle, and nobody tried to stop me.
I pushed through the front doors into the rain.
At the side curb Ambrose's black Lincoln sat with a cone in front of it.
He had followed me out.
He was talking to my father with one hand flat on the trunk of the car.
"Don't worry, Mr. Finnegan," he was saying. "I'll keep an eye on her."
I did not stop.
I walked to the corner of Hancock Street in my wedding dress, with my bouquet still in my fist.
The 211 bus pulled up with its brakes hissing.
I climbed on.
The driver looked at the dress and then at my face, and he did not ask me for the fare.
I sat down in the back with forty buttons digging into my spine.
Then I cursed Cormac Faye.
I did it out loud, by his full name, in front of eleven strangers and a woman with a stroller.
I was very specific.
I kept it up at every stop to the end of the line, and I did it every morning after that for eleven months.
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