I shook my head, but I wasn’t able to speak. Another proof of why he didn’t need me—I was an emotionally stilted woman who was terrified of what he made her feel.
Angelo’s alarm chimed from his phone on the breakfast bar. We were running late.
He picked it up and switched the alarm off almost violently. A muscle twitched in his jaw again, his eyes narrowed as if the daylight hurt him.
He then looked at me. “June,” he said, then bent to pick up his guitar case and shouldered it. He took a few steps and stopped in front of me. “I did ask you to tell me what you really wanted, and if that’s what you truly want, that’s what you’ll get—your life back. I’ll be there when you’re ready, divorce or not.”
“Angelo.”
“I’ll see you there.” He crossed the living room and left through the front door.
He was wearing his wedding ring. He had since yesterday.
I wasn’t.
30
Angelo
I wanted to hate her but couldn’t.
Resent her, same result. I couldn’t.
I was in love with a woman who had given up on love and surrounded herself in fences. A woman who treated me like I was off-limits and refused to believe that I wasn’t. Refused to believe that I was truly hers. She had been comfortable in her life before I’d arrived and made her lose control over her feelings. I knew that it scared her and that our age gap terrified her. I couldn’t do anything about the latter, but her feelings were my accomplices, my partners in crime; they would lead her back to me.
I had patience and hope because I had a visual of her eyes whenever she was with me, whenever I touched her, was inside her, when I had told her that she was mine—those eyes couldn’t and didn’t lie.
We drove in separate cars. Apart from my guitar, I had grabbed the ones I’d brought with me just yesterday, along with the tools I didn’t have a copy of in San Francisco. I left everything else at June’s, knowing I’d be back there sometime.
Every song that came on the radio made me hope she was singing it out loud and out of tune, alone in her car. I thought of her and didn’t even memorize the things we might get asked. I didn’t have to. To me, this marriage was real, and I knew my wife.
She parked a few rows behind me in the parking garage closest to the office we were heading to.
“Hey,” we both said when we met. Then, wordlessly, we walked together toward the tall, grayish-brown, faceless building.
Esther met us in the lobby.
“You’re going to be in separate rooms, and most of the questions will be similar, so if you don’t know an answer, don’t make something up. Be concise. Answer only what they ask,” she repeated the instructions that we already knew by heart. “If they suspect something, they might bring you into the same room to go over discrepancies.”
She escorted us to the floor, updated the receptionist we were there, and we took a seat on the uncomfortable plastic chairs.
“Mr. and Mrs. Marchesi, please follow us.” Two agents, a man and a woman approached us. They weren’t the ones who bed-checked us, nor Mr. Gray from our first interview.
We followed them down a long corridor of doors. Everything was gray, but all I could feel was the woman next to me. Our hands brushed, and she pressed the back of her hand against mine. I took her hand in mine and laced our fingers together.
June shifted her head to look at me. She was nervous, but we gave each other a little reassuring smile. I chafed my finger over her wedding ring and felt her pressing my hand in return.
Yes, I definitely had hope.
“Mrs. Marchesi, this is us.” The female agent stopped in front of one of the doors.
I held June by her biceps and leaned in to whisper in her ear, “Good luck. I love you.”
She moved her head back and bit on her lower lip. Her eyes glinted. I could see the “me, too,” in them.
I did not plan that the first time I’d say those three words to her would be in the gray halls of Immigration. But why not? Immigration had brought us together.
She followed the woman into the room, and I followed the agent down two more doors.
