“I’d treat any woman I married like that,” I add.
“So you’ll do it?”
“Who’s the dog with the bone, now?” I ask, referring back to our conversation from the other day.
“Just answer the question,” she says.
I think about everything I could do with a hundred grand. I could pay off the sixty-thousand my mom still owes to the hospital. And then I could finally take the time to record that album I’ve always dreamed of putting out. I could hire a band and book studio space. I could afford to take more than one dayoff every few weeks, and I could play gigs somewhere other than the Horseshoe’s open mic night.
“Fine,” I say, before I can talk myself back out of it. “I’ll do it. Against my better judgment.”
“Yessss!” Winnie squeals. “Thank you, Jonah.”
And then she’s leaning in and giving me a hug. Instinct has me wrapping my arms around her and pulling her in. The scent of her shampoo fills my nose, and her body is soft and warm against mine. Her face is pressed into my neck and for a brief moment I feel her breath on me.
She pulls away, and looks at me with a straight face once more. “Should we iron out the details?”
“We can go to the county courthouse on Monday,” I croak, suddenly parched.
“And I’ll call the estate right after,” she says.
“We’re really doing this?”
“Yes,” Winnie nods. “We’re really doing this.”
I just nod.
Winnie stands up, and walks through my living room and into my kitchen. I trail behind her, with no clue what she’s up to now. She looks around the kitchen until she spots the small bar cart I have in the corner.
“Aha,” she says, and picks up a bottle of whiskey from it. “This okay for me to use?”
“Hey, what’s mine is yours now, right?”
Winnie digs around in my cabinets and finds two glasses, and then pours a healthy measure of alcohol into each.
“Here,” she says, holding one of the glasses out to me. “You look like you need it. And honestly? So do I.”
We clink glasses and I say, “To getting married.”
“To getting married,” she repeats, putting the glass to her lips and gulping some of it down.
And then she chokes on the burn of the alcohol and coughs it up all over herself, because I guess pageant queens aren’t used to drinking their whiskey neat.
I let out a laugh, unable to help myself. “Come here,” I say, motioning at her.
She takes a step towards me, and I pull a clean kitchen towel off of the pile on the counter and then start wiping off her chin. She looks up at me, blue eyes wide, as I soak up the whiskey. I tilt her chin up and swipe at the last few drops. A shiver seems to pass through her, and she takes a step back from me.
“Thanks,” she says quietly.
“No problem. We’ll working on drinking whiskey together once we get married, okay pageant queen?”
Once Winnie leaves,I sit at my kitchen table and pick up the piece that I started whittling earlier. I grab my knife, the wooden handle warm and smooth in my palm, and start on the face of the figurine. It’s part of a chess set I’ve been working on, and this piece is a knight.
As I carve and shave the wood, my mind starts to quiet, and I think about how I’m going to tell my parents that I’m getting married. To a woman they’ve never met, who I haven’t dated, and who I’ve only known for two weeks. Okay, fine. It sounds insane when you put it like that.
But I can’t just tell them the truth, either. I can’t say that I’m marrying Winnie for money, andso that she doesn’t end up married to some asshole. They’ll understand that even less, and will probably try and stop me from paying the hospital bills. They only begrudgingly accept my help as it is—there’s no way they’ll take sixty grand from me.
I set the finished piece down in front of me and sigh.
