The Life I Chose novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Two Hours Left

Daniel Keough has come to lose a bet gracefully, but the wedding is off, and when Holt arrives with Kendall the sister lets slip it was never one night.

I took the chain off.

I didn't decide to.

My hand just did it.

Daniel stayed on the mat.

He looked down at the garbage bags, then at my bare feet, then at my face.

"I read the notice in the Journal," he said. "Saturday the eleventh. I figured the bet says your birthday, and you're not married till tomorrow, so technically I win."

"Technically."

"I came to lose gracefully. I was going to say happy birthday and drive back to Newport."

He held up the bottle.

"And give you this."

I knew the label from across the porch.

Txakolina, the cheap Basque white with the bubbles in it.

The first thing I ever poured him, eight years ago, at a wine bar on Thames Street where I made eleven dollars an hour plus tips.

I was twenty-two.

He was twenty-six, home on leave from a container ship, with a sunburn and nowhere to be for a month.

We had three weeks.

On the last night he asked me to wait for him.

I told him I would never marry a man who was at sea nine months a year.

I told him I'd be married by thirty anyway.

"Then if you're not," he'd said, "you give me one chance."

I'd laughed and shaken his hand on the Cliff Walk with the waves going off below us.

He never called once.

Not one time in eight years.

"You kept the bottle?" I said.

"I bought it this afternoon. Same one. I checked."

"It's a terrible wine."

"I know. You told me that the night you sold it to me."

I laughed.

It was the second time today, and this one didn't hurt.

He nodded at the bags.

"Whose?"

"The groom's."

He took that in.

"Ah," he said.

"There's no wedding," I said. "His sister is nineteen weeks pregnant. It's his."

Daniel didn't say anything clever.

He didn't say he was sorry, either.

He just looked at me for a long moment with those same blue eyes.

"Then I'm not losing," he said.

"No," I said. "I guess you're not."

We sat on the top step with the bags behind us.

I didn't have a corkscrew that wasn't in a box for the honeymoon, so he cut the foil with a pocketknife and worked the cork out with his teeth.

"That's disgusting," I said.

"You're a sommelier. I know. I'm sorry."

"You're not sorry."

"I'm not sorry."

We drank it out of the bottle and passed it back and forth.

It was still terrible.

"You look the same," he said.

"I look thirty."

"You look like you just set something on fire."

"I did," I said. "Eighty people watched."

He grinned.

The beard made it slower than I remembered.

"What do you do now?" I said. "Still on ships?"

"I bring them in now. Harbor pilot. I climb a rope ladder off Point Judith at four in the morning and drive a tanker up the bay."

"So you're home."

"I'm home," he said. "Since March."

He'd been home seven months and hadn't come.

He'd waited for my birthday.

He'd waited for the bet.

"It's eleven," he said. "You have an hour left of being thirty and unmarried on your birthday."

"Is that how the bet works?"

"I wrote it down. I'm a stickler for terms."

"What's your one chance, then?"

He set the bottle down between his boots.

"This," he said.

He leaned in slowly.

He gave me all the time in the world to move.

I didn't move.

I grabbed his coat by both lapels and pulled him the rest of the way.

His mouth was cold from the October air and tasted like that awful wine.

Then it wasn't cold.

His beard scraped my chin, and his hand came up into my hair and held the back of my head.

I made a sound I'd never once made for Holt.

I climbed half into his lap on my own front step in my rehearsal dress.

His hands slid down my back and stopped at my hips and held there, hard, like he was making himself stop.

"Margo," he said against my mouth.

"Don't talk."

"Headlights."

I turned.

Holt's silver Audi swung into my driveway too fast and stopped with one tire on my grass.

He got out in the same suit he'd worn to the rehearsal.

He didn't look at me.

He walked straight past the garbage bags with his key already out.

He jammed it into my front door.

It went in halfway and stuck.

He jiggled it.

He pulled it out and looked at it.

Then he looked at me, on the step.

Then at Daniel.

"Who the hell is this?"

"Daniel," said Daniel, and didn't stand up.

"Margo, open the door. Kendall's supposed to be resting. The doctor said bed rest."

"The doctor said bed rest," I said. "He didn't say my bed."

"This is my house."

"Your name isn't on anything here except those bags."

His jaw went tight.

"Where am I supposed to take her?"

"Your parents' house," I said. "She calls them Mom and Dad. You might remember."

"My father won't even answer his phone!"

"Then that's your problem."

He came up two steps toward me.

Daniel stood up.

That was all he did.

He just stood, all six foot three of him, on the step above Holt with the empty bottle hanging from one hand.

Holt stopped.

He stood there breathing hard.

Then he grabbed two of his bags off the porch rail and carried them down to the car.

He didn't come back for the others.

In the passenger seat, the window slid down.

Kendall leaned out into the porch light, pale and pretty, with her hair down over her shoulders and her hand on her belly.

She looked up at me and smiled.

"He told you it was one night?" she said. "That's adorable."

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