I Died In His Sick Game novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Shallow Water
Nan gave us ten days.
"Why wait?" she said, when Eli tried to argue. "You've already waited for paperwork. I'm not waiting for paperwork."
"You hate paperwork too," I said.
"I hate it more than him. That's why I got ordained on the internet."
Eli put his head down on the kitchen table.
"You're marrying us?"
"Twenty-nine dollars," Nan said. "I'm a reverend. Show some respect."
So on the twenty-first of August, one year to the day after I pushed a raft out into a bay and sank, I got married on the back deck of a fish shack on the Barron River.
It was a Saturday this year.
It was hot as soup.
Nan closed the restaurant and strung lights from every piling, and half of Everglades City came in their good shirts.
The old man in the captain's hat sat in the front row, because he'd been coming to the shack longer than anybody, and he said so.
The preschool kids sat on the floor at the front in a row, because nobody could stop them.
Grandma on Sundays came on a Saturday. She sat in the back row in flat shoes and cried into a lace handkerchief before anything had even happened.
The captain's sister drove down from Georgia with a pound cake.
The two detectives came, the man and the woman.
The woman wore a dress. I'd never seen her in anything but a rain jacket, and I told her so, and she said, "Don't get used to it."
My lawyer came in her running shoes.
I wore a white cotton dress I'd picked out myself, at a real store in Naples, and paid for with my own money.
My hair had grown back to my shoulders.
I didn't cover my left arm.
Eli waited at the end of the deck in a new white shirt that still had the fold lines in it.
"Nan bought it," he said, when I got close enough to hear.
"I know."
"She wouldn't let me wear the marlin."
"I know."
Tilly came down the deck ahead of me in a pale blue dress, with her guardian-angel locket and a basket.
She was supposed to throw rose petals.
She'd made her own arrangements.
She threw gummy fish, one at a time, with great ceremony, at each guest she liked.
The old man in the captain's hat got four.
When she reached the end, she stood beside Eli and took his hand, because that was where she'd decided she was standing.
Nobody moved her.
Nan stood up in front of us in a black robe she'd borrowed from the choir, over her rubber boots.
"Dearly beloved," she said. "I'm gonna keep this short, because there's grouper in the fryer."
Everybody laughed.
"When my brother found this woman, she was nobody in a hospital bed," she said. "Unknown female, it said on the board. I wrote her name up there myself."
She looked at me.
"She's somebody now. She was always somebody. Eli, you lucky idiot, say your thing."
Eli took my hands.
His were shaking.
"I pulled you out of the water," he said. "I thought that was the big thing I'd ever done. It wasn't. The big thing is every morning since, when you came downstairs."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of I Died In His Sick Game are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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