Chapter 11: The Household Account

Jessica's brother comes home at midnight on the last bus from the north coast, eats a whole tray of the sweet buns meant for her wedding, and is asleep on the sofa by one.

At seven he's in the kitchen in his service shorts, eating again. Sam is eighteen and as tall as a door, with his father's long jaw and nothing of his mother's roundness, and he has grown since spring in a way that seems to need constant feeding. Ruth slaps his hand away from the cake. He kisses the top of her head, steals a mango instead, and grins at his sister over it.

"So where is he? The Englishman. I want to see him walk."

"He walks fine now."

"The guys at the base say you can always tell." He bites the fruit. "First week, like a cowboy. Then they get the hang of it."

"Eat your breakfast," Ruth says, "and don't be disgusting at your sister's wedding."

"It isn't her wedding yet. It's breakfast."

The dress takes an hour. Jessica stands in front of the wardrobe mirror in her mother's room while Ruth does up the buttons at the back, all forty of them, small and covered in cream silk, each one through its own loop. Ruth's fingers are quick and cold. She hums something with no tune, as she does over the sewing. It smells of cedar still, faintly, under the iron.

Halfway up her back her mother stops.

"He chose the cage," Ruth says to the mirror.

"Yes."

"He didn't have to come back for that. He could have done his job here and gone home to his England when it got hard. Or not come at all."

"I know, Mama."

"He sat in that chair and he chose the cage." Ruth goes on with the buttons. She doesn't look up, and her voice doesn't change. "Your father had the same three boxes."

Jessica can't say anything after that. She watches her mother's hands in the mirror, and her mother's face, which gives away nothing, and the last buttons go into their loops one at a time, up to the nape of her neck.

When it's done Ruth turns her round and looks at her, and straightens a sleeve that doesn't need it.

"There," she says. "Now go and keep him."

Sam drives them in the car, because he has the licence the service gave him and he wants everyone to see him use it. At the ministry he gets out first and opens Jessica's door, and offers her his arm with his elbow stuck out like a handle, and for once he isn't joking.

---

Peter stands at the front of the room where he took his oath, by the same flag, and looks at the chairs on his side.

Nobody was ever going to fill them. He knew that. He has known it since a roast chicken in Chester. But the room has been laid out the way rooms like this are laid out everywhere, with an aisle down the middle, and somebody has put ribbons on the ends of the rows, and for a minute the chairs on the left sit empty under the ceiling fan like a mistake on a seating plan.

Then Mrs. Oteri, whom he knows only by name and by the way Jessica lowers her voice when she says it, gets up from her place on the bride's side, crosses the aisle, and sits down in the front row on his. She settles her handbag on her knees. She doesn't look at anyone. After a moment Dale follows her, with his wife and the boy, and then Jessica's cousin and her husband and the twins, and then half the street, until the room is evenly full, and nobody says a word about it.

Dale's boy has been put in charge of Peter's phone. On its screen, propped in his small hands, Peter's mother sits at the kitchen table in Chester in her dressing gown, seven in the morning there, with her reading glasses on so she can see properly. His father isn't in the picture. Peter can hear him somewhere behind her, asking if it's started.

The boy holds the phone up very straight and gravely, and then at the important moment turns it round to film himself.

Jessica comes in on her brother's arm, in her mother's dress, and Peter forgets the empty chairs, the phone, all of it.

The woman from the ministry who gave him his silver starfish is the registrar, too. It's a small island. She checks their two citizen numbers on her tablet, reads the words, and they say them back. The rings go on. He kisses Jessica, and the whole room claps, and behind him somebody's twin says loudly, "Ew," and is shushed.

"And now the household account," the registrar says, and takes out her own phone. "If you'd both open the app for me."

Peter has to take his phone back from Dale's boy for that, which means his mother sees the ceiling for a while. He opens the app beside Jessica's. The registrar types their numbers into her screen with her thumb and presses something, and both their phones give the same small chime.

"There. You're linked." She puts her phone away with a smile. "Now you'll both see it the moment it changes. A lot of couples like that."

Jessica looks down at her phone. Peter watches her look. On her screen, under the cartoon family, there is his name now, and under it the one line, and the red dot.

It's the first time she has seen it on her own phone. He can tell by her thumb, which goes to the dot and rests there, as if she could rub it off.

The lunch is in Ruth's yard, under the fruit tree, at three tables borrowed from three neighbors and pushed end to end. The cousin has brought a cake the size of a car tire. There are scallops grilled in their shells, bowls of crisp seaweed, flat tapioca bread still warm from somebody's oven, and sweet things everywhere between: coconut squares, papaya and guava, the sticky dried stuff Jessica fed him on the trail, boiled down in syrup. Sam eats at all of it, steadily, in his service shirt with the collar undone, and between plates he comes and sits by Peter at the end of the table.

"You're the one with the plant job," Sam says, as if they'd met before.

"Starting Monday."

"Checking the water." Sam nods slowly, impressed by something. "We had a boat in June. Off the north coast, at night. Coming in from out there with no lights." He waves a fork at the whole sea. "Do you know what it had on it?"

"Tell me."

"Condoms." Sam says it with relish. "Three boxes. Hundreds of them, little packets, all colors. The sergeant made us burn them on the beach. You've never smelled anything like it." He shakes his head at the memory. "The fishermen came over to watch."

Peter tries to imagine it, three boys in navy blue round a bonfire of condoms on a beach at dawn, the smoke going up. He finds he's laughing. Sam is pleased with that.

"Who were they for?"

"No idea. Tourists, maybe." Sam reaches past him for another scallop. "I'm not thinking about any of that for years."

Of course he isn't. He's eighteen, with his two still in his pocket, as far from the calendar as the moon. Peter looks at him eating, and then down the long table at Jessica, who is laughing at something her cousin has said, and touching her phone in her lap without looking at it.

---

They walk home to the flat at ten, the three streets, Jessica holding up the hem of the dress, Peter carrying her shoes. Nobody needs to drive anyone anywhere tonight. Nobody is waiting up.

On the landing she stands with her back to him so he can do the buttons.

He starts at the top. She can feel him trying to be quick, and then giving up and being careful instead, one silk button and then the next, out of each loop. His fingers are warm against her spine. It takes so long that she starts laughing, and he laughs too, his forehead on the back of her neck, and somewhere around the middle of her back she stops laughing, because his mouth has followed his hands down and she can't think anymore.

The dress goes over the chair. Her mother's dress, over a chair in her own flat. She leaves it there.

She has wanted this since the shelter. She wanted it all the months they were apart, and in the guesthouse, and in the car: to have him, all of him, inside her again, the way it was in Scotland, with nothing between. Tonight he's her husband, and she still can't. She knew that. Knowing it hasn't helped.

She pushes him down on the bed and climbs over him anyway, and feels the cage hard and cold against the inside of her thigh, and the little steel tag of the seal, and she hates it. Not him. It. She'd tear it off with her teeth if she could.

"Jess," he says. "Careful."

"I know."

So they do what they can, which isn't nothing. His hands, his mouth. She knows his face by now, the effort in it, the moment when wanting her goes over into hurting, and she watches him hold on past it for her sake, and comes with her fingers knotted in his hair and his name in her mouth, and it's good, it's very good, and it isn't what she wanted.

Afterwards she lies with her head on his chest and her hand resting on the steel. It's warm now, from him.

"Does it hurt?"

"It's a better one than the other." He breathes out. "It's made for wearing, the nurse said."

That isn't an answer, and they both know it.

He falls asleep before her, the way he does, all at once, his arm going heavy across her. She lies awake and listens to the town. A scooter. Somebody's radio. The fruit tree moving outside the balcony door.

Her phone is on the floor by the bed, where it fell out of the dress pocket. She reaches down for it without lifting her head. The screen lights her hand. The cartoon family, his name, the dot.

Red.

Of course it's red. It went in two weeks ago. She knows that. She puts the phone face down on the floor.

At three she wakes, and checks it again. At six, with the light coming grey round the balcony door, she reaches for it before she's properly awake, and looks, and puts it down, and doesn't notice that she has done it at all.