Chapter 3 #2
Beckett wore a charcoal shirt and dark jeans and clean boots.
He had shaved. I had not realized until I saw him at the courthouse that I had only ever seen him with a day or two of stubble, and the absence of it changed his face — made him look younger, somehow, and also more vulnerable, the line of his jaw more visible.
He saw me come in. He looked at me. He did not look at me the way a man at a wedding looks at his bride.
He looked at me the way a man looks at someone he has just been given the responsibility of, and he intends to take that responsibility seriously, and he is grateful for it, and he is also a little afraid.
Judge Pruitt did the short ceremony. I had requested the short ceremony.
There was no "love and cherish" because I had not wanted to say it out loud and have it not be true.
The judge said the necessary things. He asked the necessary questions.
We answered them with the proper words. When he said you may kiss your bride, I had not, somehow, planned for that part.
I had drafted contracts. I had built spreadsheets.
I had not thought through the moment when a judge would tell my new husband, in front of two witnesses, that he was permitted to kiss me.
Beckett leaned down. He did it slowly. He gave me time to back away, which I appreciated, and I did not back away, which surprised me.
He kissed me on the corner of the mouth — not the cheek, not the lips, the corner, that small piece of geography that is technically the mouth and technically not — and the kiss lasted maybe a second, and he pulled back, and I felt the heat of the kiss on my face for the next three hours.
We signed the papers. Sienna cried, which was a performance and also possibly real; with Sienna these are often the same thing.
Diesel shook Beckett's hand and then mine, and to me he said, in his gravel-low voice, "You're family now, Mrs. Navarro-Holt.
The club is at your back. You ever need anything, you call.
" I said, "Thank you, sir." He said, "It's Diesel.
Or it's Dad, if you can stand it. I've been called both this week. "
Sienna laughed.
We drove back to the shop in separate vehicles, which we had planned, because Beckett needed to swing by his forge to pick up some belongings and I needed to go straight to the shop because I had a customer scheduled at two.
I drove the route I had driven a hundred times in two months and I gripped the steering wheel with both hands and I said, out loud, in the car, "Okay, Alma. Okay. Okay. Okay."
He moved in that night.
He brought one duffel bag. One toolbox, smaller than the one he kept at the forge.
A small framed photograph of his mother, which he set on the dresser in the second bedroom and which I noticed and did not mention.
Three books — one was The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, which surprised me and also did not.
A coffee maker he refused to replace with mine, even though mine was newer, because his was an old percolator he'd had since he was twenty.
I made enchiladas.
I made them because my mother had made them on every important night of my childhood and I needed an important food to anchor the most surreal evening of my adult life.
I made them from scratch — the sauce from dried chiles I'd toasted on the stove, the tortillas store-bought because I had not yet entirely lost my mind.
I cooked while he unpacked. He came into the kitchen at some point with a dish towel over his shoulder and said, "What can I do," and I said, "Set the table," and he set the table.
He set the table with the precision of a smith, which is to say that the silverware was perfectly aligned and the plates were exactly centered, and I had a small, irrational moment of wanting to weep at the sight of it.
We ate at the small table by the window.
The shop was below us, dark, quiet. The street outside was empty except for one passing car. The kitchen smelled like cumin and onions and the warmth of bread.
I said, "This is strange."
He said, "It is."
I said, "We'll get used to it."
He said, "Probably."
I said, "You don't sound convinced."
He said, "I'm convinced we'll make it work. I'm less convinced about the 'getting used to it' part."
I said, "What does that mean?"
He said, "It means I think this is going to keep being strange, and we're going to keep doing it anyway."
I looked at him across the table. He was eating my mother's enchiladas with the same calm focus he brought to forge work — slow, attentive, savoring without performing.
He had not said anything in the courthouse that wasn't necessary.
He had not said anything in the truck on the way back that wasn't kind.
He had unpacked his single bag without complaint and set his coffee maker on the counter and not made a single comment about the fact that I had organized my kitchen by color and he had not, until this exact moment, ever mentioned that.
I nodded. I did not know what else to do.
He said, "Thank you for dinner."
I said, "You're welcome."
He washed the dishes. I dried them. We did not speak much. We moved around each other in a kitchen that, twelve hours ago, had been mine and was now — by law, by contract, by the small accumulation of his belongings on its surfaces — ours.
When the kitchen was clean, he said, "Goodnight, Alma."
I said, "Goodnight, Beckett."
He went to the second bedroom. He closed the door. I heard the floorboard creak. I heard him sit down on the bed. I heard the soft sound of a book opening — the Mary Oliver, I would learn later — and then nothing, the kind of quiet that fills a room when a person settles into being there.
I went to my own room. I sat on my own bed.
I held my own ring up to the lamplight — a plain band, the cheapest one the jeweler had, because we had agreed not to spend money on jewelry that would be returned in six months.
I turned it on my finger. I held my left hand out in front of me and looked at it the way you look at something that does not yet belong to you and may, in the morning, still not.
Manageable risk, I told the ceiling.
Manageable risk, I told the dark.
Manageable risk, I told myself, three times, like a prayer or a spell, and then I lay down, and I closed my eyes, and I did not sleep until almost four in the morning.
When I finally did sleep, I dreamed of the forge. Of warm metal. Of hands.
I woke up at six.
I made coffee.
He was already in the kitchen.