31. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
We were married on the Marlowe stage six weeks later.
Small, the way I wanted it. Folding chairs in neat rows on the restored floor, an aisle laid down the center where the orchestra seating used to sag, string lights crisscrossing the fly space where a century ago vaudevillians had hung their painted scenery.
The great proscenium arch spread overhead with its two plaster cherubs, the real one, and the small screaming potato Giovanni had built with his own hands during the ordinary days, which I had flatly refused to let anyone fix.
It’s still up there. It’ll be up there when the building outlives us both. Anyone who asks gets the whole story.
Miss Dot officiated. She’d lobbied for the honor with the tenacity of a woman who’d buried three husbands and considered herself, therefore, an expert in the entire arc of the institution.
“I got ordained online,” she’d said, when I gently raised the question of legal standing, “and I’ve said the words over three men going into the ground, so I certainly know how they’re meant to sound coming out over two people who are, God help them, choosing to.
Sit down. It’s binding enough. I looked it up. Mostly.”
The life came, and it came quietly.
What I noticed, walking in on Declan’s arm, was how the most dangerous people I had ever known had agreed, for one afternoon, to be gentle.
Dante on the door in a good suit, checking names off a list like the ma?tre d’ of the world’s most heavily armed supper club.
Two dark cars idling at the curb with nobody making a point of them.
And by the fire exit, sharing a flask with the loose ease of men who had genuinely decided the war was over: two of Declan’s people and two of Giovanni’s, sidearms checked at the door and stacked in a lockbox that Miss Dot had appointed herself to sit on, telling each other stories, laughing low.
A treaty made flesh. Fifteen years of blood between our families, and here it was passing a flask by the emergency exit at my wedding, arguing about the Bruins.
Rosa and my mother cried in competitive synchronization from the front row, each visibly refusing to be out-wept by the other, which turned grief into sport and got them both through it.
And Declan walked me down the aisle.
He’d claimed the walk in a hallway in Boston, at the sit-down where two families decided to stop killing each other, if there’s ever a second one, that walk is mine, and he’d earned it, or Giovanni would have answered for it, and every man in that room knew which.
He offered me his arm at the back of the house: my father’s brother, the man who’d run beside my first bike and paid for my degree and stepped into the crater my father left and done his blunt, gruff best to fill it.
“Your father should be doing this,” he said, low, not looking at me.
“He is,” I said. “You’re the part of him that’s still here.”
His jaw did something complicated, and he covered it by clearing his throat, and then he walked me toward the stage, toward Giovanni, who stood under the lights in a black suit and a tie the exact blue of his eyes, holding himself together by a thread I could see from thirty feet away.
Rosa carried Nico as best man. He wore a onesie printed to look like a tiny tuxedo, and he had, until roughly ninety seconds before the ceremony, been in official custody of the rings, a responsibility from which he’d been quietly relieved after attempting to eat them.
***
Giovanni’s vows were in English, and he read the charges against himself as if he’d written the indictment.
“I was gone for three years while I stood in the same house,” he said.
“I called it protection when it was fear. I kept a truth from you that was yours to carry, and I told myself I was being strong when I was only being a coward with excellent bookkeeping. I made decisions about your life in rooms you weren’t allowed into.
I let you sit alone at your own gala and I thanked the wrong woman for holding my life together, when you were the one holding all of it - every day, with your bare hands - and I couldn’t see it because I’d never once had to look. ”
He took a breath. His hands were shaking. He didn’t try to hide it.
“I don’t get those years back, or to fix them, and I’ve finally learned I’m not supposed to.
So instead I’m going to spend every year I have left showing up.
The big days, sure. But mostly the ordinary Tuesdays - because that’s where I lost you the first time, one quiet ordinary day at a time, and that’s exactly where I intend to keep you now. ”
Then he said the Sicilian sentence, the one he’d whispered at our first altar and kept untranslated for four years, and this time he said it loud enough for the whole room to hear, and then he translated it in front of every witness we had, so that it could never be a secret again:
“Tu nun eri mai u cuntrattu. Tu eri a fuga di iddu. You were never the contract. You were the escape from it.”
And it was somewhere in the middle of that, the itemized-failures part, the part where he was most cracked open, that Nico decided the moment had gone on long enough without being about him.
Rosa had set him down; I don’t know when. I looked over because the whole front row had gone suddenly, breathlessly still, and there was my son, on his own two feet, wobbling, both fat arms flung out for balance, staring dead at his father across the open floor.
“Dah-dah,” Nico announced, to the room, as a formal notice of intent.
And he took a step.
One, wobbling, then steady, then another. Four drunken, triumphant lurches straight down the aisle, arms pinwheeling, headed for Giovanni with the grim determination of a small man who had decided that today, of all possible days, was the day he’d been saving it for.
The entire theater held its breath watching a baby take his first steps at his parents’ wedding.
He made it four before gravity collected its debt, and Giovanni caught him, of course he caught him, scooped him clean out of the fall like he’d spent his whole life in a crouch waiting for exactly that, and Miss Dot, without so much as a pause in her rhythm, raised both hands over the three of us.
“Well,” she declared, “near as I can tell, that makes all three of you married. Congratulations. Somebody take the groom’s best man before he eats the certificate.”
***
My vows were shorter. And funnier. Because one of us had to be, and it was never going to be the Italian.
“I, Kylie, take you, Giovanni. Impossible man.” The room laughed and I let it roll. “I promise to answer when you call. To keep leaving broken things where you’ll find them, because I’ve finally made my peace with how you say it. And I promise you this-”
I looked right at him, our son on his arm, both of them watching me like I was the only lit thing in the building.
“-if you ever, ever make me feel invisible in my own life again, I keep the theater, I keep the babies, and I keep your grandmother. She likes me better.”
“True,” Rosa called from the front row, to enormous applause, and Peppina, three thousand miles away, somehow surely felt it.
Then Miss Dot said the last of the words, and Giovanni kissed me under the lights of the theater I’d raised up out of a ruin, and the whole small room came apart with joy.
Rosa and my mother weeping in earnest now, the men by the fire exit whooping, Nico applauding along, thrilled to be part of something loud.
***
He’d asked me weeks earlier, out of nowhere, in the middle of a Tuesday: Clear two weeks. Trust me?
“I trust you,” I’d told him, and then, because I could never quite let him have the whole thing clean: “Words I want in writing, by the way. From me. Notarized. ‘I trust the nepo don.’ We’ll hang it in the lobby next to the fire exits.”
He’d only smiled and told me nothing, and held the line for six full weeks, which for a man constitutionally incapable of a small gesture was its own kind of vow.
Now, at the end of the last dance, string lights blurring overhead, Nico asleep on Rosa’s shoulder, the two families’ men still passing that same flask by the fire exit like they’d been friends for thirty years instead of enemies for fifteen. I felt him press something into my hand.
Two passports. Ours. And a slip of paper with a departure time on it.
“Where?” I said.
He tucked a curl behind my ear, the way he’d done so many times, the way I now knew he’d been quietly memorizing for six years.
“Where the sauce comes from,” he said.