The judge expelled more words that meant nothing, like devotion, love, commitment; words that I heard coming through a thick fog, that ended with, “I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss your bride.” At that, the clerk lost any shred of interest and bent to sign the marriage certificate on the table then fumbled through his papers, probably looking for the names of the next couple.
Angelo narrowed his blue eyes that bordered on gray and beautifully contrasted with his skin tone and hair. He leaned toward me, the aroma of his beach-like aftershave swathing me, before his lips barely touched my cheek in a cautious peck.
I breathed out in relief as the three of us made our way out of the room. The worst of it was over, and I would never have to see this man again until our divorce.
“This is your copy,” Jerry said, “and this is yours,” handing each of us the signed and sealed marriage certificate. “June, it’s all fixed now.” He smiled at me comfortingly.
Though that meant that my many-dollars debt would now be paid in full, I didn’t feel the relief I thought I’d feel. “Thank you,” I mumbled politely, nonetheless, trying to hold on to normal things, like manners over sanity.
“I’ll be in touch if anything comes up,” Jerry added as our footsteps echoed in the grand rotunda staircase. A few couples in tuxedos and wedding dresses were having their photos taken in the majestic-looking space.
“Thank you. I really appreciate this,” Angelo said, stopping and looking at me as we reached the bottom of the staircase. His accent rolled the R’s mesmerizingly. “I want to believe that this helps you as much as you helped me,” he continued.
I stared at him, surprised at his perfect English. All I had heard him say until now were the words he’d repeated after the judge. Now I heard not just the accent but his perfect grammar.
Jerry patted Angelo’s shoulder and smiled at me as if he were his proud father. “He’s relieved,” he said, looking at me and not at the breathtaking Italian.
“Great,” I said with a forced smile. My insides felt like they weighed a ton. I wasn’t even sure I could go back to work, to my shop, the one located on the property Jerry had sold to me, that I had bought when hubris made me think I could make enough to pay another mortgage.
“Just one more thing,” Jerry said. With the grandeur of City Hall behind us, he took a picture of Angelo and me with his phone.
I looked at it later. We were both smiling in it, our heads slightly leaning toward one another in an automatic gesture everyone did when their picture was taken.
There we parted, and I walked alone to the parking lot, to my Honda that was unbelievably hot after ninety minutes under the California sun, even in spring. I started the engine, opened the window, and breathed out the air that was locked in my lungs. In my forty years, I had done only two stupid things—three, but two of them were connected. My sister always said that I lived as if I had an instruction manual to life. Well, now it was malfunctioning.
I covered my face with my hands and leaned against the steering wheel. Suddenly feeling the metal of the ring against my skin, I looked at it for a moment then took it off and shoved it into my pants pocket.
It served as a reminder that twenty-two years after I had graduated from Wayford High, I still harbored the need to prove to the rich kids there that the daughter of their cleaning lady from Riviera View had made something of herself. I never realized that that need was still simmering inside me until the opportunity to shove my success in their faces had shown itself at the right time. Only few of them came into my shop in Riviera View, though it was less than a thirty-minute drive from Wayford, so I opened another on the main street of their town. My usual careful calculations had given way to biased financial optimism.
I had hated Wayford since the day I had attended school there but had to admit that my former classmates were richer clients. And they flocked there, looking for my handmade products, strolling around my pretty, rustic, sage green, and natural wood decorated shop, purchasing everything I offered. But my revenue wasn’t enough to cover two mortgages and double the salaries, and I began missing installment after installment until Jerry had come up with his solution for my problem.
I had stepped into that one with my eyes wide open. I had taken a few weeks to think about it, knowing deep down that expunging my debt would win over. I couldn’t stand the thought of sinking back into the life I had escaped from, growing up poor.
Three mistakes in forty years. That was all. And in a way, they were all connected. The most recent cost me faking a marriage and thus committing a federal crime.
2
Angelo
“So, how does this work—do you dream in Italian? I mean, your English is so good! And you’ve been here over a year now.”
I turned my head toward Jerry, who was walking next to me in the car park. In my one year plus here, this was one of the stupidest questions I’d been asked. Given that Jerry had changed my life by incorporating me into his guitar shops business and given that he was quite a successful businessman, I gave him the benefit of considering this question as a symptom of nervousness over what had just transpired in City Hall.
“I think in Italian, too. I just translate it fast in my head,” I replied.
“You drive,” he said when we reached his car, throwing the keys over the car’s roof.
I caught them. I didn’t mind driving his silver Lexus. It was the kind of car my friends and I used to break into when we were sixteen, bored, and had wandered out of the public housing blocks of San Siro into the rich areas on the other side of Milano.
“Thank you for arranging it,” I said when I started the powerful engine. I loved that it was old-style, with actual keys and not a push button. Jerry had told me that he had to ask for it especially.
“Your American driver’s license?”
“That, too, but I meant the marriage, the green card procedure, the whole thing.”
“Yeah, I need you, champion,” he replied, reminding me yet again of why it was me out of everyone he had taken under his wings.
I was the champion in several contests of last year’s NAMM conference—National Association of Music Merchants, the Mecca of the world’s musical instruments legends. Luigi Stipano, my mentor and employer in Italy, had bought us that trip as a farewell present before his store’s closing. He dreamed of seeing the legends with his own eyes before his retirement at the age of seventy-nine, and I saw it as my swan song before going back to Milano to the only job I could find with my police records—a car manufacturing assembly line. A job in the music factory business was rare.
