Step Aside, I'm the King of Capital novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Hospice Vows

Emerson's uncle is thrown out of the hospice by her dying grandmother, the contract is written on a tray with clause four, and they marry at the bedside; the old woman has read Tristan's watch.

Emerson drove, with no wasted turns and no signals.

The hospice was a low brick building on Butler Street with one light on over the door.

We reached it two minutes before the black sedan did.

The night nurse at the desk looked up and saw Emerson.

"She's awake," the nurse said. "She keeps asking whether you've come with the groom."

"The groom?" I said.

"I told her I was bringing someone," Emerson said. She didn't look at me. "I told her in September, and then he left, and I never took it back."

The room at the end of the hall smelled of lavender and hot plastic.

A small woman lay in the bed with an oxygen line under her nose and a white braid over one shoulder.

Her eyes were the same hazel as Emerson's, and they went over me in one slow pass.

"This is the groom?" she said.

"This is Tristan," Emerson said.

"He looks like a man who's been thrown out of somewhere."

"He has," I said.

"Good," the old woman said. "It's a sign of character."

The door banged behind us.

"Emmy." It was the man in the tweed vest, breathing hard from the stairs. "Emmy, stop this. It's a nervous breakdown. Anyone can see it."

"Barnaby," the old woman said.

He stopped.

"Mother, she's brought a stranger in off the street. It's obscene."

"It's my room," his mother said. "I'm dying in it, so I'll decide what's obscene."

"I only want what's best for the company."

"You want what's best for your accounts." She lifted one hand from the blanket, and the nurse at the door took a step forward. "Remove my son from my floor."

"Mother."

"Two nurses and a chaplain are on this hall, Barnaby, and none of them like you."

He looked at Emerson, and then at me, and for a moment I saw the whole shape of him: the bald head, the vest, the greed pressed flat under the tie bar.

"This isn't over," he said.

"It ended at the door," the old woman said. "Go."

He went.

The nurse closed the door softly behind him.

Emerson's shoulders slumped.

"All right," the old woman said. "Where's the paper?"

There wasn't any paper in the room, so Emerson found a legal pad in her bag and wrote on it against the meal tray.

She wrote fast, in square capitals, and she numbered every line.

I leaned over her shoulder.

One, the marriage lasts until the shares are safe.

Two, no one tells the family it isn't real.

Three, separate rooms.

Four said, NOBODY OWES ANYBODY ANYTHING IN BED. NOT TONIGHT. NOT EVER.

I read it twice.

"That's the fourth one," Emerson said. "I want it understood."

"It's understood," I said.

"Your turn." She held out the pen. "Add what you want."

I thought about it.

"Nine," I said. "Either of us can leave with one day's notice."

She looked up at me, surprised.

Then she wrote it, and under it she wrote eleven, and under eleven she wrote, NO ONE GETS THE TRUTH ABOUT WHY UNTIL THE SHARES ARE SAFE.

We both signed.

The chaplain came in with a cardigan over his pajamas, because the nurse had phoned him at home.

He read the short form of the vows in a voice like a tired radio.

"Do you, Emerson," he said.

"I do."

"Do you, Tristan."

"I do," I said.

It was the strangest sentence I had ever spoken, and the least rehearsed.

I took the ring box out of my pocket.

It held the pawnshop diamond I had bought for another woman.

Emerson saw it and went still.

"I can't use that," she said.

"It's a ring," I said. "It's never been anyone's."

She held out her left hand.

It was long and cool and not steady, and the band slid on to her third finger.

"By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," the chaplain said. "And by Mrs. Lindahl's insistence."

"Get on with it," said the bed.

"I now pronounce you married."

Emerson didn't kiss me.

She put her forehead against my shoulder for the length of one breath and straightened up again.

The old woman watched the whole thing with her eyes half shut.

"Emerson, go and get your mother's photograph from my bag," she said. "It's in the zipper."

Emerson went.

The chaplain went, and the nurse went, and the door clicked.

Then the old woman opened her eyes and turned them on me.

They were not the eyes of a dying person.

"Come here, young man."

I went.

"Your coat is a rag," she said. "Your shoes were made to measure by someone who knew your foot."

"They're old shoes."

"I owned a company for fifty years," she said. "Clerks don't wear those."

I said nothing.

She lifted her chin toward the corridor, toward the way her son had gone.

"In August my son brought a man to this bed to pay his respects," she said. "Mr. S."

I kept my face still.

"He told me he loved my flowers," she said. "His hand shook the whole time he said it."

I had hired that hand for its steadiness.

"Yours doesn't shake," she said. "And you lie better."

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