The Bride Ran, So I Wore Her Crown and Married the Valley's Don novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Lavash and Honey

At the reception the bride's father pins one dollar to her veil, the groom says nothing, she covers for his missing solo dance, and at the farmhouse stairs she sets her term: nobody lies to me in your house.

The reception was in the church hall, with the long tables set in two halves and a clear stripe of floor down the middle.

The Boghosians sat on the left and the Kasparians on the right.

Nobody had told the guests to do it, and nobody mixed.

I sat at the head table in another woman's gown, with a husband who had not said a word to me since the parking lot.

His name was Vahan Kasparian, and I had learned it from the priest.

He sat very straight with his gloved hand flat on the tablecloth, and he looked at the room and not at me.

A small gray woman came across the floor with a round of flatbread in her hands.

She was his mother, Shushan, and she laid the lavash over both our shoulders so that it hung across both of us.

"For a house with enough in it," she said in Armenian.

Then she dipped a spoon in a jar of honey and put it in my mouth herself.

It was the first kind thing anyone had done for me since the vestry.

"Thank you," I said, in the same language, and her eyes went bright.

Around us the guests did not applaud.

At the nearest table a woman in a fur collar turned her chair a quarter turn away from me.

At the next table, another one did.

I heard it moving down the room, a small scrape of wood on linoleum, table after table.

My father sat at the far end of table twelve and ate nothing.

The band started, a dhol drum, a clarinet, a man on the keyboard, and the money dance began.

The guests came in a line to pin bills to the bride's gown, as they do at every wedding in the Valley.

Most of them walked past me with their hands in their pockets.

Garo Boghosian stepped out of the line last.

He took one dollar bill from his wallet and held it up so the hall could see it was a single.

"For the sewing," he said.

He pinned it to my veil.

A few men laughed, and then more of them did.

I sat there with a dollar on my head.

I looked at my husband, and he looked at the tablecloth.

His gloved hand did not move, and he said nothing to Garo or to the hall.

I added that to the account I was starting to keep.

Shushan came back through the line without a word.

She pinned a hundred-dollar bill to my sleeve, folded in four, and said in a clear voice, "For my daughter."

The laughing stopped.

Then the drummer called the groom's solo.

In every Armenian wedding I have ever been to, the groom dances alone first, with his arms out, and his friends clap him in.

The dhol rolled, and the clarinet climbed.

Vahan Kasparian did not rise.

The drummer rolled it again, and the room started to murmur.

I heard a man say, "It's the hand," and another say, "He can't."

My husband sat with his jaw set and did not move at all.

I thought of the dollar, and I thought about leaving him there.

Then I stood up in four yards of someone else's lace and walked out onto the floor.

I put my arms up and took the first figure myself, the slow turn with the shoulders, the way my mother had taught me in our kitchen.

The drummer found the beat under my feet and the clarinet came in behind me.

My father got up from table twelve, wiped his hands on his trousers and joined the line.

Then Shushan did.

By the third figure the whole Kasparian side was on its feet, and half the Boghosian side too.

When I turned back, my husband was standing at the edge of the floor.

He held out his right hand to me.

"The first dance is ours," he said.

He put his left arm around my waist, and I felt the glove settle against the small of my back.

It was warm, and I could feel the buckle through the lace.

"That was not part of the treaty," he said into the noise.

"Neither was I."

His chin was an inch above my hair.

I felt him breathe in, once, slowly, with his face in my hair.

When I looked up, there was nothing at all in his face.

I decided it was the hairspray.

The farmhouse was twenty minutes out, in an orchard of figs and pomegranates, with a porch light on and every window dark.

His driver let us out at the steps and drove away.

My husband stood at the bottom of the stairs with his hand on the rail.

"You have the room at the west end," he said. "My mother is in the east wing. I have the room across the hall from yours."

"All right."

"The door at the end of the hall is my dressing room. You will not open it. And you will not ask me about my hand."

"All right," I said. "I have one term."

He waited.

"Nobody lies to me in your house."

He looked at me for longer than I expected.

"Agreed," he said.

He went up ahead of me.

I heard the door at the end of the hall close, and then I heard the lock turn.

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