The Bride Ran, So I Wore Her Crown and Married the Valley's Don novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Three Chairs

My father was sitting on the step of his trailer with his oxygen machine at his feet and his cap pulled low.

The yellow notice was nailed to the door behind him.

My husband had come with me without being asked.

He stood in the gravel in his gray suit, beside the black car, and looked at the trailer, at the pistachio shells on the step and the bad tire on the truck.

"Papa," I said.

"I'm not going to be your charity, Talin."

"It isn't charity."

"It's your husband's gravel I'm sitting on?" He looked up, finally, at the man beside me. "Mr. Kasparian."

"Mr. Hovsepian," my husband said.

"You'll forgive me if I don't stand."

"I would not ask you to."

My father cracked a pistachio between his thumbs and said nothing.

"There is a guest cottage behind my house," my husband said. "It has a bad roof and a good stove. My fig trees have been failing for three seasons and I do not know why."

"I'm a vineyard foreman. I'm not a gardener."

"Then foreman my figs."

My father looked at him for a long time.

"What does it pay?"

"What you ask."

"I'll ask a fair wage," my father said, "and I'll take it in front of my daughter, so she can see I'm not lying about what I take."

"Agreed."

He got up, groaning, and I picked up his oxygen machine so he would not have to.

Supper that night was in the cottage kitchen, at a table with three chairs.

Shushan had sent over a dish of lamb and rice, and my father ate with his elbows out and told us about the worst foreman he ever worked for, a man who counted raisins by hand.

My husband laughed.

It was a short low laugh, rusty from lack of use, and I found that I was staring.

"You don't have to look at me like that," he said.

"I'm not looking."

"You are looking at my mouth."

My father reached for the salt.

"Does that hand ache in the cold?" he asked, without turning his head.

"Sometimes."

"My brother lost a thumb in a baler. It ached every November for forty years, and he never stopped favoring it. Cups, doors, forks. He always reached with the other one."

My husband held a fork in his gloved left hand.

"I use it as I need to," he said.

"That's what I noticed," my father said. "Doesn't know it's supposed to hurt."

He went on eating.

Nobody at the table said anything for a moment.

The concentrator in the corner of the room began to whine, as it did a dozen times a night, and my father shook his head at it.

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