She Took My Husband on My Wedding Night, I Didn't Find Out Until We Gave Birth Together novel · Chapter 32 of 32
Chapter 32: Clear Water
I was out of bed before I was awake.
Margo was in my arms before I knew I'd crossed the room.
I took the stairs barefoot, two at a time, with her blanket trailing and my heart hitting my ribs.
The kitchen was full of gray haze.
The probie was standing on a chair, twisting the smoke detector off the ceiling.
The lieutenant was fanning the door with a dish towel.
And Cormac stood at the stove in his boxers and a T-shirt, holding a frying pan full of something black.
He saw me and slapped his free hand over his eyes.
"Don't look at me," he said. "It's bad luck to see the groom."
"It's bad luck to see the bride."
"Then don't look at you either."
"What is that?"
"French toast." He peeked through his fingers. "It was French toast. It was going to be breakfast in bed. It's a tradition."
"Whose?"
"Mine. As of four this morning."
The alarm stopped.
The probie climbed down holding it.
I stood in the doorway with my heart still going and Margo blinking at the smoke.
Then I started laughing.
Then I was crying a little too.
Cormac put the pan down and crossed the kitchen with his eyes shut, and walked straight into the table.
"Ow."
"Open your eyes, you idiot."
He opened them.
He put his arms around both of us, right there in the haze.
"Sorry," he said into my hair. "Sorry. I didn't think."
"It's okay." I pressed my face into his shirt. "It's toast."
The lieutenant took the frying pan out of the room at arm's length.
"Sit," he said to me. "Today you don't cook. Nobody else here can, but today you don't."
The big guy made eggs.
They were very good eggs.
He cried into them only a little.
At four that afternoon the bay doors were up and both trucks were parked out on the apron, washed until they shone.
The probie had repainted his sign.
PIE SATURDAY. ALSO A WEDDING.
There were sixty folding chairs on the concrete between the oil stains, and every one of them was full.
Both shifts, with their wives and kids.
The lieutenant's four nieces, in purple, throwing petals at everyone whether they were walking or not.
The woman from the peach stand. The man in the Bruins jacket, with his sister.
My lawyer, in a blue dress with no coffee on it.
The housekeeper from the Brookline house, who worked for Winifred now, with Margo's brother on her knee in a tiny bow tie.
Margo sat on the big guy's lap in the front row in a yellow dress, eating a petal.
I wore cream.
Short sleeves, a full skirt, my hair down.
No pearls.
Winifred met me at the side door of the kitchen, on her cane, in lavender silk.
"Nervous?" she said.
"No."
"Good. I am." She held out her arm. "Lean on me, and I'll lean on you, and between us we'll make it to the front."
We walked out into the bay together, slowly, between the chairs.
The crew started humming.
The song from home.
Cormac had taught it to them over a year of night shifts.
Every one of them sang the line where everybody gets the words wrong, wrong.
Cormac stood at the front in his dress blues, with the lieutenant beside him holding a folder that said GOVERNOR on it.
When we reached him, Winifred put my hand in his.
"She's not mine to give," she said. "But I walked her here. Don't make me walk back."
The lieutenant opened his folder and read the whole thing in his sermon voice.
When it was time for vows, Cormac went first.
"I promise to never cook for you," he said. "And to be there when you wake up. Every time. Even when it's four in the morning and you're going to go bake something."
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