CHAPTER TEN
ADELINA
The dress does up at the back with fourteen covered buttons and Bruna cannot do them.
She gets four. She gets four and then her hands stop, the way hands do at seventy-one. She says something short and furious in Sicilian at her own fingers. Shakes them out. Goes at it again and gets one more.
That is five. There are nine to go and we have been in this vestry for eleven minutes.
"Bruna."
"Sta zitta."
"I can get Nico."
"No."
"He's outside the door. He's literally standing outside the."
"Not him," Bruna says.
She gets a sixth button.
And then she stops and puts both hands flat on my shoulder blades for a second, which is the first time she has touched me on purpose since I came into this house, and she says, "Wait," and goes out.
I stand in a vestry the size of a bathroom with my back half open.
There is a mirror in here that is probably a hundred years old and has gone black in the corners, and I look at myself in it, and the dress is fine.
It is plain and cream and it has a high neck and long sleeves and it came in a box from a shop in Manhasset with a woman called Renata Greco's business card on it, and I laughed when I saw the name and then I had to sit down.
My mother's ring is on my right hand.
That is the only thing on me that nobody bought.
I am twenty-three years old and I am getting married in four minutes to a man who has said a total of maybe eight hundred words to me in my entire life, and the thing I keep coming back to, standing in that vestry, is that I am not crying.
I have been waiting all morning to cry.
I have been sort of looking forward to it.
The door opens.
I know it is him before I turn round because of the light.
He takes up the whole doorway. There is a window at the end of the vestry passage and when he stands in the door the light goes out of the room, and I watch it go, in the black corner of a hundred year old mirror, and I do not turn round.
"Bruna's hands are bad," he says.
"I know."
"She's gone to get her rosary off the seat. She'll be four minutes."
"Okay."
"Adelina."
"Do it," I say. "Please. I'm not standing here for four more minutes."
He comes in.
He shuts the door, which he does not have to do, and he stands behind me, and I look at the floor and I hold my own elbows.
Then he starts on the seventh button.
I have thought about this a great deal since, and I want to get it right, because it was eleven seconds long and nothing happened.
Here is what happened.
Salvatore Marchetti does up nine covered buttons on the back of a dress.
Six foot three. A man that men on my own street cross the road to avoid.
It takes him a very long time, because the buttons are small and his hands are not, and the second and third knuckles of his right hand do not work the way knuckles work.
And I can feel him being careful.
That is the part.
The care.
The backs of his fingers touch my spine on the fourth one. He says nothing. I say nothing. Neither of us moves.
He does the fifth one, and the sixth one, and I am standing in a vestry with my eyes shut listening to a man breathe through his nose.
And then it is done. Fourteen buttons.
And he does not step back.
That is the thing. He has finished. There is no button left.
He is standing behind me in a room with a shut door and his hands are somewhere between my shoulder blades and the small of my back and he has run out of any possible reason to be there, and he stays, for about four seconds, and I do not move either.
Four seconds is a very long time.
Then he steps back and says, "There's a rose on the chair," and goes out, and shuts the door with both hands so it does not bang, which is the exact way my uncle shuts a door, and it undoes me completely for reasons I cannot begin to explain.
My brother is waiting at the back of the chapel in a jacket that belongs to Nico.
It is enormous on him. They have rolled the sleeves twice and it still comes to the middle of his hands, and somebody has put a white flower in the buttonhole, and he is standing dead straight with his heels together like somebody has told him where to put his feet in the last five minutes, which somebody has.
"You look like a hotel," Matteo says.
"Thank you."
"Not a bad hotel."
"Okay."
"A good one." He looks up at me. "Are you all right."
And I have had my father, and my sister, and my uncle, and a housekeeper, and a priest I have never met, and Nico, and a man in a doorway with fourteen buttons, and none of them asked me that.
"Give me your arm," I say.
"I don't know which one."
"The one nearest me."
"That's what Nico said." He puts it out. His hand is freezing. "He said if I get it wrong it doesn't matter because there's only four people watching."
"There's five."
"He's not people," Matteo says. "He's the groom."
The chapel has eleven seats and four of them have people in them.
Bruna in a black hat. Nico in the same shirt he was wearing last night with his hair wet. Tommaso Greco, at the back, standing, with his hands folded in front of him. And Frankie, in the door, half in and half out, in case somebody comes up the drive.
Father Dominic is small and very old and he has a voice like a bus.
And Salvatore is standing at the front in a black suit with his back to me, and he does not turn round, and the priest has to say something to him, and then he does.
Here is what I expected.
I expected to look at him and feel the thing I felt in my uncle's restaurant, which is the thing you feel when a big dog comes into a room and you do not know whose it is.
Here is what happens.
He looks at my brother.
He does not look at me at all. He looks at the nine year old in the borrowed jacket holding my arm. Something moves across his face and is gone in less than a second. Only then does he look at me.
And by then it is too late, because I have seen it, and I cannot unsee it.
We walk up seven feet of aisle.
Matteo takes it very seriously and goes about half the speed I would have gone. At the front he stops and lets go of my arm and then does not know what to do, and stands there.
Nico reaches out and hooks him in by the shoulder and puts him in the second row.
Father Dominic opens his book.
It takes nine minutes.
I have been to eleven weddings and every one of them was an hour and a half, and this one is nine minutes, because there is no mass and no music and nobody to sit through it.
I do not hear most of it.
There is a part where you say things and I say them.
My voice does the thing where it comes out flat and clear and slightly too loud, the way it does when somebody is dying in the restaurant and I am the one calling the ambulance, and Father Dominic gives me a little look over the top of the book that I think is approval.
And then it is his turn.
And he says it the way he says everything, which is quietly, and with no decoration on it at all, and when he gets to the part with my name in it he does not say Adelina.
He says the whole thing.
"Adelina Renata Silvestri."
My mother's name.
Nobody uses it. It is not on my licence. It is on a baptismal certificate in a tin in a box in the trunk of a car that Frankie drove out here on Monday, and it was on the paperwork Tommaso filed, which is how he has it, and there is nothing mysterious about it at all.
It just goes through me like a nail.
Because he has had that sentence in his mouth since some point this morning and he has decided to say all three of it, and there is no possible reason to do that except one, which is that he knew what it would do.
I look at the floor.
I look at the floor for about four seconds and I get it back, and when I look up he is watching me, and his face does not move, and he knows exactly what he has done.
The kiss is nothing.
I want to be very clear about the kiss.
Father Dominic says the line and Salvatore turns and takes my face in one hand, which is not nothing, that part is not nothing, his hand covers the whole side of my head and I can feel the flat knuckles against my jaw.
And then he puts his mouth on mine.
Dry. Closed. Three seconds. No pressure at all.
It is the kiss you give an aunt at Christmas. It is a kiss performed for four people in a room and a piece of paper, and he does it and steps back and lets go of my face and turns to the priest.
I will come back to the kiss.
There is a book to sign in the vestry afterwards.
It is an enormous thing with a green cloth cover and a ribbon. Father Dominic opens it flat on a table that is too small for it and holds it down with his forearm.
We sign. Then Bruna signs. Then Nico signs with a flourish that takes about nine seconds and involves a small loop.
"Witnesses," says Father Dominic. "Two. That's it. We're done."
"I want to do it," Matteo says.
Everybody stops.
"You have to be eighteen, son," says Father Dominic.
"But I walked her in."
"You did."
"So I should be on it." My brother has his hands at his sides and his chin up and the jacket sleeves down over his knuckles, and he is not being cute, he is completely serious, and he has clearly been working up to this since the second row.
"If I'm not on it then in a hundred years somebody looks at that and there's no way to tell I was even there. "
Nobody says anything.
And then my husband, who has not spoken since the vow, reaches past the priest and turns the book round and puts his own pen down on the page under the last line, in the blank part, where nothing official goes.
"Write it there," he says.
"It's not a real bit."
"It's a real book."
Matteo takes the pen in the whole fist, the way he does, and writes MATTEO SILVESTRI, AGE 9 in block capitals across two inches of a parish register that has been in that chapel since 1911, and he puts a full stop after it.
Father Dominic looks at the ceiling for a moment.
"All right," he says.
Here is the kiss again.
Three seconds of a closed mouth, and it is so much worse than anything else he could have done.
Because I have spent nine days getting ready for the other thing. I have run it in the car, I have run it in the shower, I have lain in a bed in the east wing at two in the morning and built the whole thing in my head, and in every single version of it he takes something.
That is what those men do. Everybody knows what those men do.
And instead he does up my buttons and says my mother's name and walks back down the aisle to talk to Tommaso about a car, and I stand at the front of a chapel in a nine hundred dollar dress with a rose in my hand, and I understand that he is not going to take anything.
He is going to wait.
He is going to wait, and he is going to be careful with me, and he is going to be in the house, and he is never once going to ask.
And somewhere at the back of all of this, in a place I am not going to look at for another five weeks, something in me says:
He's not going to make you. You're going to have to go and get it.