good girl
LEXI
Like a couple of serial killers returning to the scene of the crime, I glanced at Nicolai as Ueli stopped the car at the Russian Orthodox Church where we’d gotten married less than twenty-four hours before.
The other two chase cars rolled to a stop on either side of us and parked, their engines idling in the hot early evening.
“Are you out of your mind?” I asked Nicolai as we sat in the back seat, desert sunlight lying on my arm, burning. “What, do you want to give that priest a chance to wave the crowns over us again and suck the ‘married’ right out of us?”
He winked at me.
That crazy manwinked at me.
He said, “I’ll take care of it.”
He held my hand as we got out of the car, trotting a step ahead of me like a psycho husky dog pulling at the leash.
“What are we doing here?” I asked as I followed him up the sidewalk in the baking late-afternoon desert heat, dreading him ditching me in the oven-blast afternoon. “The priest can’t undo the marriage. It’s too late. Hesaidso. We have to undo it the other way. With the annulment. Next year, like you said,if you want. Or Las Vegas’s quickie divorce rule. But we shouldn’t be bothering this guyagain.”
Nicolai halted in front of the medieval church doors banded in iron and turned back to me, his eyebrows darting closer together, maybe a frown, but his smile was bewildered. “Why would I ask him to undo the marriage?”
Oh, truth. Truth would get me in trouble every time. “Because you came to your senses?”
Laughing a carefree, throaty chortle, Nicolai pounded with the side of his fist on the enormous doors of the Russian Orthodox church and, receiving no response, trotted us around to the back and knocked on the rectory door, shouting in Russian the whole time.
His guttural words sounded like he was threatening the whole midcentury modern ranch-style house with dismemberment and murder, in that order.
Again, I almost pressed my hands to my face, but I remembered Clementine’s makeup artist’s work at the last second and flipped my hands away, and then my neck hurt from flinging my head forward and whiffing.
The same gray-bearded priest opened the door, wearing the same ornate robes and headdress as he had been the previous night. He immediately started yelling at us, first in Russian, which I couldn’t understand but sounded like he was on the verge of summoning his mafia goons to bury Nicolai in cement, but then he switched to English. “There are no take-backs. You are married, and I cannot do anything about it now. Take it up with higher church authority.”
Nicolai started a sentence in Russian but then transitioned to, “—we don’t want an annulment.”
“You don’t want annulment?Whydo you not want annulment?” He turned to me and stared me right in the face. “You weren’t drunk last night. Why doyounot want annulment?”
He was cornering me. I didn’t know what to say. “We got married. That means we’re married forever, right?”
The priest’s jaw dropped, and he looked aghast at me. “You are good girl. You are good girl who does not deserve big drunk like this.Youshould talk to higher church officials about annulment.”
Nicolai held up the shopping bag with the ring boxes in it, explaining, “I didn’t buy her a good ring last night. I bought a better ring now. She deserves a better ring. She wants the rings blessed.”
The priest scowled harder at me, demanding,“Youwant rings blessed?”
Okay, obviously my input was required. “I thought the rings we used last night werefine,but Nicolaireallythinks we need different rings. So, I’m just like, whatever. But blessing the rings was a big part of the wedding ceremony. It’s part of what makes usmarried.”
“Coming to altar and crowning makes you married. Feeling the vocation to be married and form your own church of the home makes you married. My wife and I, we marriedthirty years.She is the blessing of my life.” The priest looked between the two of us, still scowling. He finally asked Nicolai, “You are going tostaymarried to this girl?”
Nicolai looked the priest straight in the eye. “Absolutely.”
He must have been lying his butt off because I knew that wasn’t part of his plan whatsoever.
I made a mental note again of what Nicolai looked like when he lied, and unfortunately, he looked exactly the same as when he said everything else.
Damn,he was a good actor. I was jelly.
But I had all of college and maybe private lessons in myfuture to learn how to act, if I got the money for being married to him.
“She is good girl. You don’t get annulment from her.” And then the grizzled priest looked straight at me. “You are too good of girl for him. Maybeyouwill get annulment. Both of you come with me. Is good thing I am ready for Mass anyway.”
