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“Please tell him thanks for the flowers, and I hope he gets well soon.”
“I promise we’ll celebrate as soon as I’m back.” Her best friend had paused. “Are you sure about this? Seems awfully sudden.”
Emmie had lied and said she was sure, but the truth was she wasn’t sure at all.
So maybe it was good Honora wasn’t here. Emmie was having a hard enough time pretending she was a happy bride. She couldn’t even quite convince her father, though he wanted to believe it with his whole heart. There was no way she could have fooled Honora.
But she’d rather marry someone she didn’t love than shame her already grief-stricken family. For the last month, Emmie Swenson had been the scandal of herneighborhood, since the warming weather made her burgeoning belly impossible to hide. When her father and brothers demanded to know the name of the man who’d “seduced and abandoned” her, Emmie said she’d had a one-night stand in Rio while she was there working on a real-estate deal with her boss, Theo Katrakis. Which was true, as far as it went.
Theo.
She didn’t want to think about him.
Holding her rose bouquet with one hand, she gripped her father’s arm with the other so she had the strength to walk. Her breathing came in quick, shallow gasps as Karl Swenson led her out into the church foyer.
“Careful, sweetheart.” He flinched as her fingers dug into his arm. He added apologetically, “I’m not as bulletproof as I used to be, now I’m off the whiskey.”
“Sorry.” Loosening her grip, she forced herself to smile till her cheeks hurt. “You know I’m proud of you, Dad.”
He patted her hand, his blue eyes watery. “I’m proud of you, too. He’s a good man. You can build a good life together.”
Emmie hoped so. Her mother’s death seven months ago had caused enough grief and pain for her family. Since Emmie had revealed her pregnancy last month, her brothers had gotten into multiple bar fights defending her honor, while their shamed father had nearly started drinking again.
She was grateful to Harold Eklund for giving her a way out. The elderly widower, a friend of their family, had been living on his own for years. His apartment was filthy, his clothes rarely clean, and he survived on cola and cheap sandwiches from the bodega across the street. He’d offered Emmie a home, in exchange for her tending house and cooking his dinners. There was no question of love, and certainly not of sex.
But Harold was a kind man. Missing his own faraway grandchildren, he’d offered to help out a bit with her baby. They could help each other. She’d be able to work from home, doing her father’s bookkeeping, for at least her baby’s first months, long enough for her to figure out what to do. She wouldn’t stay married to Harold forever—or would she?
Since their engagement was announced two weeks ago, her brothers no longer came home at night bloodied and scowling. Her father could again hold his head up high.
Surely that was something she could be proud of. As long as her family was happy, Emmie could live without love.
And good riddance. Love had only broken her heart.
“You sure about this, sweetheart?” Her father looked at her as they stood in front of the chapel doors. “Harold is a good man.” He hesitated. “But marriage lasts a long time...”
Taking a deep breath, she nodded. “I’m sure.”
Biting his lip, Karl Swenson nodded with an uncertain smile. Turning in his rumpled suit, he opened the chapel doors.
The triumphant organ music crashed around them like a wave. As Emmie entered on her father’s arm, the people packed into the crowded pews rose noisily to their feet. Swensons and Eklunds had lived in their little Queens neighborhood for a hundred years, and everyone had come to see the disgraced, pregnant Swenson girl marry the long-widowed, much-pitied retiree.
It was funny. When Emmie was a little girl, she’d sometimes longed to beseen. But now, as everyone openly gawked at her from baby bump to badly fitting wedding dress, she wished she could hide under a rock. Some people whispered slyly behind their hands, others smiled encouragement. Being the center of attention was both exhilarating and terrifying.
Theo made you feel like that, a small voice whispered inside her.The night he...
Emmie pushed the memory away. She couldn’t think of Theo, not now, not when she was about to marry another man.
She looked up at Harold Eklund, waiting for her at the end of the aisle beside the minister. He was beaming at her, shifting his feet, his thin gray hair combed back carefully, his suit dated and tight.
As she moved slowly down the aisle, Emmie glanced down at the engagement ring on her left hand, with its tiny diamond. “Betty would want you to have it,” he’d told her two weeks ago, rheumy eyes wet with tears. “No good gathering dust, she’d say. She’d be grateful to you, taking me on, just until I can see her again.”
With a deep breath, Emmie forced her leaden feet onward. As they reached the front of the church, the organ music abruptly stopped, and suddenly it was deathly quiet.
The minister blinked down at her, then intoned, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today...”
Emmie barely heard the words. She was dimly aware of her father passing her hand to Harold’s care. He held her hand awkwardly, gingerly.
Marriage lasts a long time.
