"Yes." He looked at me for a moment. "I wanted to talk about tonight. About expectations. I should have done it before the ceremony but my mother was quite firm about not seeing you beforehand and I didn't want to argue with her on my wedding day."
I knew what he meant. I had been around enough of this life to know how advantageous marriages worked, what was expected and when, and I had been thinking about it with a combination of nerves and something that wasn't nerves at all, which I was finding more difficult to manage than the nerves. "I understand what's expected," I said. "I'll agree to it."
He looked at me with an expression that suggested he hadn't expected quite that much directness, and then before I could say anything else he pulled me down onto his lap in the reading chair, which I also hadn't expected, and I landed against him and wrapped my arms around his neck because it seemed like the most natural thing available and looked at him from very close and thought that this was a problem I had not adequately prepared for.
"God, you're gorgeous," he said, and moved his hand into my hair and directed my face toward his, and this time when he kissed me it was nothing like the careful version at the altar. This had intention in it, and I kissed him back with everything I had been managing carefully for five days and felt him pull me closer and thought that dinner was going to be a very long wait.
We were both breathing differently when he finally pulled back, and he looked at me with dark eyes and said, "We should go back," and I nodded even though going back was the last thing I wanted to do.
"Eat fast," he said, standing and pulling me up with him, and I laughed, a real one, and let him pull me back toward the door and the noise and the candlelight and the family that was mine now, and thought that I had run from one life and landed in another and that the landing, against all reasonable expectation, felt exactly like arriving somewhere.
CHAPTER 11
CONSTNATINE
Dinner was its own particular kind of suffering.
Not because the food was bad -- Cecelia had seen to that, the osso buco she'd made for my father the day before having apparently set a standard that Maria had risen to meet with something that smelled extraordinary and tasted better. Not because the company was poor. My parents were in better spirits than I'd seen in weeks, my father sitting at the table rather than taking his meal upstairs, my mother beside him with her hand over his in the easy unconscious way of people who had touched each other so often the gesture had stopped requiring thought.
It was suffering because Cecelia was sitting across from me in my mother's wedding dress with her hair coming slightly loose from the way it had been put up, one dark piece falling along her jaw, and she was laughing at something my father had said, a real laugh, her whole face in it, and I was supposed to be making conversation and eating dinner and behaving like a man with ordinary concerns when every single thing in my awareness had narrowed to the woman across the table and the considerable distance between here and the end of the evening.
She caught me looking at one point and held my gaze for just a moment before looking back at my father, and the color that moved across her cheekbones told me the distance was not exclusively my problem.
My father was in remarkable form. Whatever combination of the occasion and Cecelia's company was responsible for it, he was sharp and present and funny in the dry specific way he was funny when he was feeling well, and he held the table with the easy authority of a man who had been doing it for forty years. My mother watched him with an expression I recognized, the one she wore when she was storing something up, committing it to memory, which she had been doing more and more often in recent months.
I looked at them and thought about forty-one years and what it would mean to build something that lasted that long, and then I looked at my wife and thought that the word wife was going to take some getting used to and that I was not opposed to the process.
"Constantine, would you help your father to bed?" My mother appeared at my elbow while Cecelia was talking to one of the staff, her voice quiet and her eyes on my father, who had begun to show the particular translucence that came when he had pushed past his endurance for the evening. "He won't say so himself."
"Of course." I stood, and Cecelia stood with me before I'd said anything, which was exactly the kind of thing she did that I had given up trying to anticipate.
"I'll say goodnight to him while he's still down here," she said, and moved across the room to where my father was sitting before I could respond.
I watched her kneel down beside his chair, which put her at his eye level, and take his hand in hers with the naturalness of someone who had known him for years rather than days. "Therewill never be enough thank yous," she said quietly, "for what today meant."
My father looked at her with an expression I had never seen him use on anyone except my mother. "My girl," he said, "I am very glad I was here to see it." He squeezed her hand. "I will see you tomorrow."
She leaned forward and hugged him gently, careful of him, and he put his arms around her and said something against her hair that I couldn't hear, and when she pulled back she was blinking hard and smiling at the same time, and he was smiling too, the full unguarded smile he saved for things that genuinely moved him.
"Good night, daughter," he said.
She stood and stepped back and I saw her press her lips together briefly before she turned and found me watching and held my gaze with eyes that were bright and a little overwhelmed, and I thought that whatever else was true tonight, that moment had just happened and I was going to remember it for the rest of my life.
"Wait here," I said quietly. "I won't be long."
Getting my father to his room took longer than it had a month ago, which was its own quiet information I filed away without examining too closely. He was slower on the stairs than he'd been at Christmas, and I matched his pace without commenting on it, and when we got to his room he sat on the bed and exhaled with the relief of a man who had been holding himself upright on willpower for the last hour.
"She's remarkable," he said, while I helped him with his jacket.
"I know."
"No." He looked up at me. "I don't think you know yet. I think you're beginning to." He settled back against the pillows andlooked at me with the particular clear-eyed attention he brought to things that mattered to him. "Open the top drawer."
I did. Inside was a red velvet box that I didn't recognize. I brought it to him and he opened it and turned it toward me, and inside on a bed of dark velvet was a necklace, a rose worked in gold with a small diamond at its center, matching the one my mother had worn for as long as I could remember.
"When I had your mother's made I had a second one made for your wife," he said. "I always knew there would be one." He closed the box and held it out to me. "Everyone who sees her wearing this will know she is a Venosa. That she is welcome and she is protected and she belongs." He looked at me steadily. "Make sure she knows the same thing."
I took the box and held it and thought about what it meant that he had carried this in his drawer for forty-one years waiting for this night. "Thank you, Pop."
