Chapter 24: The Real Wedding

We got married for the second time on a Saturday, at six in the morning, in the bakery.

The shop was not yet open to anyone.

Bev insisted on that hour.

"The morning line is the only crowd that ever showed up for you without being asked," she said. "Let them watch."

She had been ordained on the internet in four minutes.

The certificate was in her purse, in a plastic sleeve, and she took it out twice to check that it was still there.

By a quarter to six there were sixty people in the kitchen and the alley.

The retired man who bought two rye loaves a day wore a bow tie.

The dentist had brought his wife.

The fire captain had brought half the station, and they stood in a row in their blue shirts holding paper cups.

I came down the back stairs in a plain white dress and my mother's old apron.

It was the one apron I owned that she had worn.

At my throat hung her silver locket, scorched along one edge, on a new chain.

Eli had mended it himself in the garage, link by link.

He had given it back to me on Thursday in the palm of his hand.

"I should have done this six years ago," he'd said.

"You did it when it mattered," I'd said, and put it on.

Now I walked down the narrow aisle between the flour sacks, and every face I had known for thirteen years turned to watch me.

Eli stood at the end of it beside the steel worktable, in his gray jacket, with his sleeve pushed up.

He had pushed it up on purpose.

The scar showed pale in the lamplight, wrist to elbow.

He did not cover it.

When I reached him, he took my hand without a word and held it against his chest.

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