Kolya's brothers, the few who came, were courteous and brief, left early, and tipped the band like they were purchasing its silence. No one explained them. No one needed to. They were his, and his was now mine, and that was the end of the sentence. The Pakhan blessed the marriage with one grave nod that I felt in my spine, danced a single careful dance with my abuela, then withdrew to a corner to watch the room the way Kolya does, except that he was smiling, which I had not known that face could manage.
Deysi spent the night relentlessly courting a six-and-a-half-foot enforcer named Dmitri who answered her every question with a single syllable and looked, by the time the cake came out, like a man quietly arranging to move to Brooklyn. "I'm keeping him," she informed me. "He's a Saint Bernard that can deadlift a sedan."
Maks claimed exactly one dance and spent the whole of it looking just past my shoulder, the way he does when something has gotten to him. "He was a dead man when you found him," he said at last, turning me with startling grace for a man his size. "Walking, talking, giving orders. But dead. I had made my peace with burying him young." He cleared his throat hard. "I will not be doing that now. So." That was the entire speech. From Maks, it was a symphony.
At one point I found my abuela with Kolya's face held in both her hands like a melon she was deciding whether to buy.Whatever she said to him, low and meant for him alone, I will never know. But he nodded once, the way he nods when a thing has just become law, and she patted his cheek hard enough for the table to hear and announced to the room at large that the man could cook, and that this, in the end, was the only thing she had ever truly required of him.
Then Petya stood up with a glass, and the whole room braced, because Petya with a microphone is a loaded weapon nobody remembered to put the safety on.
"I know this man twenty years," he began. "Twenty years, he does not laugh. Not one time. I think the bad people take the laughing out of him when he is a boy, like a tooth." He aimed the glass at Kolya. "Then comes this one." He swung it to me, and his whole face came apart. "A nurse. From Brooklyn. Half his size and three times his nerve. And she fixes the broken part. No surgery. She only refuses, every single day, to let him stay broken. You hear me? She refuses." He had to stop. He pressed his knuckles to his mouth and glared at the ceiling. "I am not crying. It is the flowers. Who brings this many flowers inside? To Ruby. To the boss. And to the girl who is coming, because Petya knows, Petya always knows, do not argue with me, and she will be impossible, thank God, because look at the two who made her."
Brooklyn married the Bratva that day, and somehow nobody got shot. Petya cried through the whole toast and blamed allergies.
I watched Kolya through all of it. He did not cry. He may not be built for it, not yet, maybe not ever. But he found my hand under the table and held on hard enough to bruise, and his jaw was doing the thing it does when he is holding up a wall by sheer will, which from him is the same as sobbing. Petya saw it too, pointed at it in pure delight, and had to be helped back into his chair.
There was one last moment, late, when the old fear came to call.
A tray went down near the kitchen, a tall bright crash of glass, and my body flinched before my mind could catch it, the year that taught me a loud sound is only ever a warning seizing me from the inside out. Half the room moved. Kolya's hand was already over mine, steady, there before I had even finished startling.
Then a waiter swore in Russian, and Galina roared something back that made three enormous men laugh into their drinks, and it was nothing. A dropped tray at a party. I sat and waited for the fear to climb the rest of the way up, the way it always had.
It never arrived.
"It's really over," I said. Not quite a question. I needed to hear it sit in the air anyway.
"Longer than you have let yourself believe," he said, and turned my hand over to thread his fingers through mine. "You can set it down now. I will carry whatever is left."
And the strange part, the part I am still getting used to, is that I believed him all the way down, with not one piece of me left standing guard.
The band slipped into something slow, and my husband walked me out onto the floor.
We did not really dance. I was nine months gone and roughly the dimensions of a parade float, so he set one hand low and certain at my back, folded the other around mine, and turned us through a small careful circle, his whole body angled to catch me if the ground so much as hinted I might go down.
"You're staring," I said.
"I am committing it to memory."
"The dress?"
"Your face. Keep it exactly there."
"You know the entire room is watching us."
"Let them. I have spent my life being watched by people waiting for me to slip. This is the first time I have not cared in the least what they see."
A wedding with this much firepower in the room should not have felt that safe. It did, right up until my water broke on the dance floor.
It came between one slow turn and the next, a warm and total certainty, and I went rigid, and his hand flattened against my spine, instantly alert, already reading me the way he reads weather and exits and oncoming trouble.
"Ruby."
And I started to laugh, because of course. Of course it was now. In the dress. On the floor. In front of two hundred Russians, two grandmothers who would absolutely make this about whose cooking did it, and a string quartet that had not signed on for any of this.
I fisted both hands in his lapels, hauled him down to me, and grinned up into the hardest, gentlest face I have ever loved.
"Kolya. It's time."
40
