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She looks down at her nails, then back up. “I’m coming.”
Astrid doesn’t hug her. She says, “All right.”
And the three of us sit there with a cardboard bridge on the table and no idea where any of us will be living next season.
Apparently this is a family meeting.
Chapter twenty
Astrid
The ceremony room has six chairs in it and a flag in the corner, and my daughter takes the first one and puts her bag underneath it.
The judge asks whether she would like to come up.
Nobody answers for her, which is the first thing today that happens exactly as it should. She shakes her head and says she is fine where she is.
Six years ago a man closed a suitcase in our bedroom and chose the front door over hers, and I have never told her the sentence he said to me first, which was that if he saw her he would not be able to leave.
She is watching her mother do this again.
The judge talks about legal intent and voluntary consent. I listen to all of it, because I am a woman who reads the whole page, and because somewhere in the next year there is a federal officer who will ask me what was said in this room.
Twice during the legal language Colt draws breath to say something to a judge, and twice he does not, and I understand that I am marrying a man who has to be physically prevented from making a courtroom laugh.
That is a true reason. It is not the honest one.
The honest one is that I am standing in a county building in a dark coat marrying a man I have known fifteen weeks, with my daughter’s status fastened to the back of mine like a form I am not permitted to file separately, and that I want this.
“Do you take Colt Riley as your lawful husband?”
“I do.”
Two words. I have said them before, in another country, in a church, to a man who meant them at the time.
The judge turns to Colt.
There are four jokes available to him in this room. I know because I have watched him find one in every room he has walked into since November, and because he is a man who fills a silence the way water fills a glass.
He takes none of them.
“I do.”
That is the part that gets through.
“Then by the authority granted to me by the state of Texas, I pronounce you married.”
Married. No music, no aisle, somebody coughing out in the corridor.
Colt touches my hand and I turn it over and put my fingers through his. My face does what I tell it to.
“You may kiss if you want,” the judge says.
Tova makes a noise. “Please keep it normal.”
Colt looks at her. “What does that mean?”
“You know.”
