Then Gary asked him his intent. “Do you, Cain, take this woman as your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer, from this day forward, for as long as you both shall live?”
I swore there was a pause before Cain answered, “I do.” I realized I’d been holding my breath when I let it out.
My boss/officiant turned to me and I made my voice strong as I also answered his question with those same two words. I heard my mama start to cry and was aware that they weren’t tears of joy.
Then Gary asked for the rings. Rather than choosing between my nephews for the ring bearer job—to prevent the argument between my sisters—I had given the gold band I’d picked up the night before to Cassidy to hold, and she took it off her thumb and offered it to me.
But Cain just stood there, frozen. “No. No, I forgot it. I don’t have one,” he said.
“Oh.” Gary blinked. “Well, that’s all right.”
“You can have mine, Ari,” Cassidy said, and started to twist her new engagement ring off her finger. The rain that had been holding off began to drip down from the sky in big, cold plops.
“No, don’t take off your ring!” I ordered my cousin, and she stopped.
“Can you go ahead without it?” I asked Gary.
“Well, we got the declaration of intent out of the way, so I think we’re ok,” he said doubtfully. “You really don’t want to borrow one?”
The dripping of the rain turned to pelting and I cleared my throat. “I’ll just quickly say my part,” I told him, loudly enough that everyone could hear me. “We’re almost done!” I repeated the words Gary said and put the ring on Cain’s left hand, tugging a little to make sure that it fit him. He didn’t even glance at it but his fingers closed around mine, strong but very cold.
“By virtue of the authority vested in me under the laws of the State of Tennessee, I now pronounce you husband and wife.” Gary smiled at Cain. “You may kiss the bride.”
The expression on Cain’s face made me think he’d rather have licked the bottom of his shoe than kiss me. He brought his lips briefly to mine—our second kiss. Then he stepped back and looked down at me, and there was total silence, no music, no clapping. Oh, my word.
“We’re married,” I whispered, and he nodded. Then he stepped back a few paces, sat down on a bench, and dropped his face into his hands.
What had I done?
∞
“I’ve never been farther west than Sour Lake. That’s in Texas,” I explained to the flight attendant. He nodded. “I have cousins there.”
“That’s great.” He was edging away.
“We’re not very close, so I’ve only seen them once, when we flew to Dallas and then drove because my Aunt Destinie was getting remarried and she’d been one of my mother’s best friends when they were kids in Mississippi. It was my first time in a plane and I was really excited.” I sounded desperate, because he was leaving. “One of those cousins is in prison, which is interesting!”
The flight attendant had already gone onto the next row to pass out drinks and snacks. Cain and I were sitting in first class at the front of the airplane, and they gave you all kinds of great stuff up here—except companionship, because the flight attendants had their jobs to do, and they didn’t really want to stop to chat for hours about my cousins in Sour Lake, or Cassidy’s wedding, or Eimear’s either, or what San Francisco would be like, or anything else that I was interested in. “Sorry,” I called after him. “Sorry, I know you’re busy.”
“Did you say something?” Cain picked up one of the earpads of his headphones and looked at me. “These are noise-canceling.”
I nodded eagerly, excited that my noise wasn’t being canceled at the moment. “I was just mentioning that the furthest west I’ve ever been before is Sour Lake. I mean, until now, because I think we must have passed Texas. What state do you think we’re over?”
He shrugged, uninterested. “Want to sit next to the window and look out?”
“That’s ok. It’s all clouds under us anyway and you’re set up there with your work stuff.” I drew a breath to keep talking but he put the headphone back on and turned to his laptop. And that conversation was the most words that had passed between us since our vows.
Cain had left immediately after the ceremony, leaving me to head to a late lunch with the members of my family who hadn’t had to return to work, or take kids somewhere, or had gotten so cold and so wet from the rain that they just wanted to go home. I changed out of my dress behind a tarp that my sisters held up in the welding shop and we’d rushed through the storm to our cars.
After the quiet, weird meal without the groom, I’d gone back to my apartment with Cassidy, with Cain still not responding to any attempt to reach him. I’d spent our wedding night sitting on the sofa with my cousin, watching movies to distract myself from crying about Miss Liddy, telling both of us that everything was going to be ok. I’d been so worried about him that I’d been close to throwing up, but he’d surfaced in the morning with a text about movers coming to my apartment later that day to pack up my belongings. Then later, he’d sent another message saying that he’d talked to the apartment building’s property manager and paid my share of the rent for the remainder of our lease.
We’d communicated like that for the rest of the week. He’d been too busy to come to Chattanooga, he’d told me, and no, he didn’t want me to drive out to his house—it was his, now, and not Miss Liddy’s. So that was what I’d told my family at church last Sunday when they’d asked why I was still in the apartment and not staying with my new husband: he was too busy, so many loose ends to tie up, and I was busy, too.
It was a poor excuse for us to be apart, especially since I should have been comforting him over the loss of his aunt, the woman who’d raised him. My relatives had shaken their heads or nodded encouragingly, depending on how they felt about the future of my marriage. My mother had cried and my sisters got very, very angry.
“What’s the matter with him?” Amory hissed, and Aubree suggested that she go over to Miss Liddy’s old house to give him a piece of her mind. It had been nice, actually, how they had forgotten to fight with each other as they united as a team against my new husband.
My husband. He was, and here we were. I had two huge suitcases in the belly of the airplane and the rest of my belongings were somewhere on a road below us, in a truck on the way to California. Cain had come to the apartment this morning and waited quietly as I hugged my family goodbye and then I’d cried all the way to the Chattanooga airport. I’d cried most of the way to Charlotte, too, and also as we waited there for our connecting flight to San Francisco.
Cain had hardly spoken two words to me, but he had patted my knee a bunch of times, and gone to the food court to get me napkins to blow my nose. I didn’t even want to consider what my eyes looked like, and now that I was thinking about the goodbyes again, here came the tears.
“Aria.” His headphones were off and hanging around his neck.
I sniffed my emotions back in. “Yes?”
“Did you bring anything to do? It’s a long flight.”
I nodded. I had an old tablet with movies and a book that Cassidy had sworn was the most romantic thing she’d ever read, about a football player from Tennessee who went up north and fell in love. “I’m fine,” I told Cain, but now that he could hear me, I moved to take advantage. “What are you working on so hard?”
“Since it’s the end of the year, I’m reviewing the P and Ls from all our departments. I’m planning out bonuses so we can expense them for deductions, assessing the accelerated depreciation of…” He stopped. “Do you understand anything I just said?”
I felt like an idiot as I shook my head. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I can’t understand the things you do, either.”
“Mostly at the law office, I made copies and answered the phone,” I told him. “Gary and Eimear worked on the hard stuff.”
“I meant with your family. How you’re always getting them calmed down, stopping the arguments and making peace? I have no idea how you accomplish that.”
“Because I’ve had years in that job and they give me lots of opportunities to practice.” I looked at his screen, at the strings of numbers there. “Will you tell me what you do? Will you explain it to me again so that I can understand? I didn’t when you talked to me before.”
“It’s boring,” Cain warned me, but I told him that I didn’t care, and he did explain so that I got it this time and could tell other people, too, if they asked me. Which my family had done plenty. But really, I was just glad that we were talking, no matter what it was about.
“So that’s what I do all day. What are you going to do in San Francisco?” he asked.
“Oh.” I thought for the first time about that. There had been so much happening in Chattanooga, I hadn’t even begun to imagine what I’d do in a new place. My new home? “I don’t know. I hadn’t considered it, but I’ll have to get a job.”
“You don’t have to. We don’t need the money.”
“Oh!” I hadn’t considered that, either.
“Let’s switch seats so you can see outside,” he suggested again, and this time I nodded, since now maybe I wouldn’t have to try to chat with the flight attendants anymore. The guy across the aisle was asleep, and anyway, he hadn’t answered any of my earlier questions to him.
After we moved our stuff and changed chairs, Cain went back to talking about my new life in California. “You could figure out what you really want to do before you start going on interviews,” he said, and I thought of my former boss and our discussion of my Future Prospects. “You could spend time learning about the city, make friends, find your favorite coffee place, join a gym.”
I got what he meant. He’d seen me squeezed into the dress on our wedding day. “I really do need to go to the gym,” I agreed. “But it would feel strange not to be working. I’ve always had a job, ever since I started babysitting when I was twelve.” My mama had never liked to admit it, but we weren’t well-off, and the pageant outfits for my sisters had been very expensive. I put my hand on his arm, over the big console which separated us. “I’m glad you’re talking to me. This has all been very weird and quick.” But not, as he’d said, easy.
He nodded and sighed. “It also feels like last week lasted a year.”
“Cain, I’m so sorry about Miss Liddy. I’m so sorry you had to find her and I wish I could have helped you.”
He looked past me out the little window at the clouds and put his headphones back on. My hand fell to the console, and the conversation was over.
“Oh, my word! We’re landing in the water!” I squealed a few hours later, and he took off his headphones because it had come out pretty loud, too loud to be totally noise-canceled. We didn’t fall into the ocean, it turned out, but I started out my life in California in total terror. Cain had a car come pick us up and we loaded my huge bags into it and his small rolling suitcase that he’d managed to live out of for the entire time he’d been at his aunt’s house. It was literally the size of my makeup case!
“Are we in the city now?” I asked, looking out the car windows into the dusk.
“We’re driving in. We’re going to get stuck in traffic.”
He meant that. Cain kept working on his laptop as the car sat and then barely inched forward, but I started to really, really wish that I’d stopped in the busy baggage claim area to go to the bathroom. I really, really wished it.
He got out a flask of water and took a long drink. “Thirsty?” he offered, holding it out to me.
“No, thank you. Not at all,” I said, and squirmed. We wound around different roads, all clogged with cars, and went up and down hills, until we stopped in front of a house, a giant one. It looked a little familiar because I’d seen Miss Liddy’s pictures.
“Here we are,” Cain said briefly, and went to open the front door. I barely paid attention to him or to the driver struggling with my four-ton suitcases as I ran inside to find a bathroom. I spotted the gleam of a mirror in a room right off the entry and blessedly, there was a toilet.
When I came out, much happier, I couldn’t find him. I wandered through the foyer, my shoes clicking on the marble floor and echoing beneath the high ceiling, which was painted black for some reason so that it looked endless, like being lost in space. Oh, my word. I walked into a library with shelves of books that rose up for miles on all sides of me, through a dining room with a table that would have seated a large number of my relatives, into a gleaming kitchen that could have been in a restaurant—a nice restaurant, and not like the places I’d worked in high school.
No, not a restaurant, either. It was more like it wasn’t real, like it was a fake house. This place reminded me of the pictures online of that were so obviously staged, like a blogger with five kids actually had a white sofa with no stains on it! Everything in Cain’s house was perfectly placed like those pictures, from the furniture, to the black and white art on the walls, to the urn of matching wooden spoons arrayed next to the stove. It didn’t appear that anyone had ever used those spoons, but they looked really good!
I was afraid to touch anything, even though I was hungry because I hadn’t eaten much since I’d left Tennessee. I carefully opened the refrigerator, but it was empty. Well, of course! Cain hadn’t been here in weeks. I opened cupboards instead and found dishes and glasses, pots and pans, everything shiny and new. No food, though.
I heard a slight noise above my head and went to the stairs. “Cain?” I called quietly, and then took a few steps up. “Cain?” I walked to the second floor and followed the muffled sounds to black double doors at the end of the long hallway, and I knocked.
“Come in.”
He was already at a desk with a much larger computer than the one he’d used on the plane, six or so screens full of numbers. “I ordered dinner on the way from the airport,” he told me without glancing up. “Chinese. I’ve wanted good Chinese food since I left here.”
“Oh. Sure, that sounds great,” I answered, wondering if I’d ever eaten good Chinese food, since maybe we didn’t have it at home. I looked around the huge room, at the tall bed with the silvery drapes and his large, dark desk. Like the rest of the house, everything in here was black, white, or a shade of grey. It definitely looked like a boy room. No, a man room, and there were no pink bags to mess it up. “Where did you put my stuff?”
He pushed back his chair. “I’ll show you,” he said, and to my surprise, walked back out of the room and down the hallway. “You’re in here,” he told me over his shoulder as he opened another tall door that led to another bedroom, smaller and also decorated in shades of grey. My bags were on the floor in front of a big bed. “This is where Aunt Liddy stayed when she came to visit,” he mentioned, and looked around himself, like he was remembering. “I wish I’d had her out here more.”
“She wasn’t lonely at home, if that’s what you were thinking,” I said, and he glanced over at me. “She told me about all the things she did and she had a very busy life. I know she missed you but she heard from you a lot, and she loved it when she did see you. She talked all about the vacations you took together.”
“Not enough.” He sighed.
“That’s how it feels when you lose someone,” I agreed quietly. “It never feels like it’s been enough.” I also looked around the room that had been his aunt’s, not wanting to ask the obvious question: were Cain and I really not going to share? Not a room, not a bed?
I heard a far-off chime. “The food’s here,” he said, and was gone.
I sat down on the thick mattress and sank several inches, then I looked across at myself in the silver mirror above the dresser, and the sight was frightening. I dug out my makeup bag to try to make some repairs before I hurried downstairs, where Cain was seated at the big island in the kitchen, eating something I didn’t recognize.
“Tomorrow I can cook. If I can find a grocery
store in this big city!” I said as I seated myself next to him.
“Don’t you have your phone?”
“It was a joke,” I tried to explain, but jokes never got funnier when you talked about them.
Cain was looking at my hands as I nervously played with chopsticks. I’d never been good with them and maybe he thought that was stupid. “What?” I asked.
“I was thinking about a ring. I’m sorry I forgot it on that day.”
He meant on our wedding day. “You had enough on your mind.” I’d checked when he’d come to pick me up to go to the airport, and he was wearing his. “I don’t need a ring. I really don’t,” I insisted. I didn’t want him to spend more money on me, not when he’d paid my rent for eight months for an apartment I wasn’t even living in and bought my first-class ticket to San Francisco.
“If you don’t want one, fine.”
I looked at him, trying to read what he felt behind the words. “What about my bedroom?” The roll I was trying to pick up with the chopsticks plunked back onto my plate and I frowned at it. I was starving, but actually, I probably didn’t need anything fried!
“Don’t you like the room?”
“It’s beautiful! I meant, why am I in one room…” Why weren’t we in the same place? It was hard to say it.
“It’s better that way,” Cain said. He expertly tweezed a roll with his chopsticks and popped it into his mouth.
It was better? How? Maybe, I thought, it would give us a chance to get used to each other. Maybe…maybe it was what he’d said, about me going to the gym. I thought about the pictures of him with his prior girlfriend, the one he’d called Demetra, the one who had also lived in this house—in his bedroom, I bet! She was as skinny as these chopsticks that I couldn’t use right. I gave up on them, and telling myself that I was happy to eat some steamed broccoli with my fingers. No, I didn’t need any soy sauce, either. The salt might make me bloat.
I put our plates into the dishwasher while Cain got on his phone, telling someone that he was back in town, laughing slightly at something the person said to him, mentioning that sure, he was glad to be in San Francisco, but not whispering one single word about bringing a wife here with him. I looked at my empty left finger as I wiped rice off the marble countertop and into the disposal, which this perfect kitchen had. The more I thought about it, the less I’d wanted a ring! We weren’t really married—we weren’t even going to share a bedroom. His ring, the one I’d pushed onto his finger back in the garden at the welding shop, just seemed like a big lie. I didn’t want to wear a circle of lies like that on my hand.
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