The Bride Ran, So I Wore Her Crown and Married the Valley's Don novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Measure

They write the first Friday lie together, she takes his measure with her tape and stops at the left cuff, and at night his mother stands in her doorway asking for a boy named Armen.

On Monday morning my husband gave me three true things to tell Garo Boghosian.

He did it at the kitchen table, standing up, with a cup of coffee he never drank.

"I sleep at the packing house four nights out of seven," he said. "I eat standing. I have not said a word to you about the treaty."

"That's all true?" I asked.

"Every word of it. He will check each one and find that it holds."

"And none of it tells him a thing."

"No," he said.

I wrote the three lines on the back of a receipt, in my smallest handwriting.

He watched my pencil.

"Mrs. Kasparian," he said, "you are very calm for a woman who sold herself in a vestry."

"I didn't sell myself. I sold a year."

"The year is the same thing."

"Then it's a good price," I said.

The corner of his mouth moved, and then it stopped.

I looked at the gray suit he was wearing.

I had been looking at it since the church.

It hung wrong.

The shoulders were too broad for him by a thumb on each side, and the sleeves were a half inch short.

The jacket had been cut for a man with a thicker neck and a shorter arm.

"Who made that?" I asked.

"My father's tailor," he said.

"He made it for somebody else."

"It is what I have," he said.

"Stand there," I said. "And take off the jacket."

He stood still for a moment.

Then he took it off with his right hand and laid it on the back of a chair.

The tape measure was around my neck, where it always is.

I pulled it free and went to him, and I did not give myself time to think about the man.

I started at the shoulders, because that is where a suit begins.

He was wide there, and hard, and he held himself so still that I could feel the effort in it.

I ran the tape across his back and read the number aloud.

Then I came around the front to take the chest, and had to stand close enough to put both arms around him.

The tape pulled tight across his ribs.

His breath went in, and it did not come out again.

I wrote the number on my palm with the pencil and did not look up.

"You hold your breath when someone measures you," I said. "Everyone does. Let it go."

"Is that an instruction?"

"It's a fitting."

He let it go, and it was slow.

I took the right sleeve, shoulder to wrist.

I knelt and took the outseam down the leg, and then I took the inseam, and I had to put my hand high on the inside of his thigh to hold the tape in place.

I felt the heat of him through the wool.

I felt, against the back of my wrist, that he was hard.

I held the number for a count I did not notice and then I read it out in a flat voice.

The leather of his glove creaked.

He had taken hold of the edge of the table with his left hand, and he was gripping it hard.

I decided the tape had been cold.

I stood up, and I held out my hand for the last measurement.

"Give me your left wrist," I said.

"No."

"I need the cuff."

"No," he said again.

He had pulled his arm behind him, and he was close enough that I could see the pulse in his neck.

I did not step back and neither did he.

We stood there with the tape hanging between us, and the kitchen clock ticked on.

"You have my chest, my shoulders and my inseam, Mrs. Kasparian," he said at last, very dry. "You will want to hold something back for the second fitting."

It stung and it was funny, and I found that I wanted to laugh and slap him in the same breath.

"Mr. Kasparian," I said, "I will take every inch you give me."

I wrote the last number on my hand.

He put on the jacket and went out to the car without his coffee.

That night I could not sleep.

The house was old and full of small noises, and I lay in a bed that smelled of cedar and thought about the weight of his thigh under my palm.

At two in the morning I heard a floorboard in the hall.

I sat up.

The door opened, and Shushan stood there in a long white nightgown with a kerosene lamp in her hand, her gray hair loose to her waist.

She was looking past me at the window.

"Armen," she said, in Armenian. "Armen, you are late. The river is up. Your brother has gone to bring the truck."

I did not know what to say.

A younger woman in a robe came up behind her and took her by the elbows, gently.

She was the housekeeper.

"She means the little boy who drowned," the housekeeper whispered to me. "Don't correct her. It only makes it worse."

They went back down the hall together.

I sat in the dark and counted the doors, and I could hear Shushan humming all the way to the east wing.

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