The Night Before We Got Married novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Pancakes

Briggs made pancakes at nine in the morning, and they were the worst pancakes I have ever eaten.

The first three were black. The fourth was raw in the middle. The fifth was shaped like Wisconsin.

"I'm a little shaky," he said, flipping it. "I had a night."

Mara's blue dress hung on the radiator under the kitchen window, dripping onto a towel.

My hair was still damp. I was wearing his gray sweatshirt with MFD on the front, and Goldie's thick socks.

Goldie had slept on the sagging couch in her ruined velvet. She refused to go home.

"I'm not letting her out of my sight," she'd said at two in the morning, "until she's sixty."

Birdie sat at the wobbly table in her fire-truck pajamas, with her cape still on.

She'd been quiet for almost four minutes. For Birdie that was a medical event.

"Romy," she said. "Why were you in the lake?"

Briggs's spatula stopped.

Goldie put down her coffee.

I looked at the three of them.

At the dress dripping on the radiator. At the syrup bottle with the cap glued on crooked.

I'd practiced this on Goldie's couch for a month. I never got past the first word.

"Because I'm not from here," I said.

And then I told them.

All of it, from the first word to the last, and it took longer than the pancakes.

Birdie's mouth got rounder and rounder.

Briggs turned off the burner and came and sat down and didn't say anything.

"It had a word for the three of you," I said. "Unregistered."

"Who's unregistered?" said Birdie.

"You were. All three of you."

"That's so rude."

"It was. It admitted it was wrong, at the end. In the lake." I looked at my hands. "It read you out loud. All three. And it read me."

Nobody said anything.

The radiator ticked.

"It's gone now," I said. "Since midnight. It's just me in here."

I waited for one of them to laugh, or to look at me the way the lawyer had in the lobby, like I was unwell.

Briggs reached across the table and took my scarred hand.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"You were drowning in a lake at midnight in November because a voice said so. I pulled you out. I don't need it to make sense." His thumb moved over my knuckles. "Okay."

Goldie took off her glasses and cleaned them on her blouse.

"I found you asleep by my stage door at nineteen with no shoes and no last name anybody could find," she said. "I always knew you came from somewhere weird."

I laughed so hard I had to put my head on the table.

Birdie climbed up on her chair.

"Can you still cry on purpose?"

"Yes."

"Are you an alien?"

"No."

"Are you staying for my birthday?"

"Yes."

"Then I don't care," Birdie said, and sat back down and ate the Wisconsin pancake.

The news came on the radio while Goldie washed up.

Delphine Sorrell had been charged that morning with first-degree arson and attempted murder.

Her publisher had pulled Ash from every store.

The scar clinic had taken her face off its website and released a statement saying she had never been eligible for its trial.

Goldie turned the radio up and stood there with a wet plate in her hand, listening, and when it was over she cursed, very quietly, a single terrible word.

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