“And furthermore,” Andy said, her teeth grinding in her head and her eyes so wide with rage that she thought they might pop out of her face, “I will not be bullied and threatened into a marriage and having sex with a man I hardly know. You need to leave, now!”
Raji was staring at her. Instead of resting her arm on Andy’s shoulders, Raji was stroking her back, trying to calm her down.
Uncle was leaning back on his heels, his eyes squinted with anger.
Her friends who had clustered around them mostly wore scrubs, color-coded garments of blue, green, mauve, and navy blue. Ten or so people were standing there, watching, waiting. There was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking back and forth, but no one had intervened quite yet. The raised eyebrows were directed at her, looking for guidance. The snarls and frowns were directed at the uncle, and he looked around the circle nervously.
Andy kept right on at him. “How dare you come into my place of work and do this? These are my friends—”
She flung out an arm.
People crowded forward. Raji was right on uncle’s shoulder.
“—and I will marry Cadell if I damn well want to, right now!”
Much murmuring of agreement came from the group. They shuffled forward toward the uncle.
The door behind Andy clanged open. She glanced back, still in overdrive with rage and adrenaline. Every muscle in her body was tensed to leap and pummel the crap out of her uncle or to run like hell. Her heart pounded in her chest as she snorted air.
Cadell looked worse.
He was wild-eyed, panicking, and his long arms reached for her like he was drowning.
She caught him as he fell toward her, and he wrapped his arms around her, resting his cheek against her hair.
“What’s wrong?” Now she was panicking, too. “What happened?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Cadell said, breathing hard. “Nothing’s wrong now.”
“Are you hurt?” Steel rose in her voice. “Did someone attack you?”
“I’m fine, now,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
Andy shook Cadell off and marched over to her uncle. She grabbed his shirt with both hands like she was shoving him off a cliff. “What the hell did you do?”
Her uncle’s jaw clenched, and he had the decency to look ashamed.
Cadell grabbed her shoulder. “It’s fine. Don’t.”
Raji hovered, looking between the two of them.
One of her cousins, Vivekananda, ran up, his dark eyes wild. “You are shaming the family! I tried to do what was right!”
She turned on him. “What the hell is wrong with you? You sound like a fanatic! I am ashamed of both of you!”
Andy grabbed Vivekananda and frisked him. She worked with a lot of recovering addicts in liver transplant. A lot of things in the hospital could be very tempting to recovering addicts, sterile syringes, sterile gauze, let alone the pharmaceuticals. She could frisk someone as well as any police officer.
In his shirt pocket, she found the small, orange balloons. Hard lumps were palpable inside the latex.
Oh, God.
She glanced at Cadell.
His dark eyes were lucid, and again, he was breathing quickly and looked like his heart was racing, not lethargic and stoned.
She turned back to Vivekananda. “Is this what the fuck I think it is? Is this heroin?”
Vivekananda grabbed the balloons out of her hand and took off.
She yelled, “Security! He has drugs!”
Some people in the crowd took off after him. One woman was gaining on him as he went around the corner.
“Now go,” she told her uncle. “Don’t come back. Don’t ever speak to me again. I am disowning both of you. Go!”
From behind her, she heard Cadell say, “You heard her. Leave before security gets here.” He sounded tired.
Raji shoved the uncle backward.
The group of her friends around them was riled up, encroaching, and her uncle slunk away.
Frustration welled up in Andy, and her fists vibrated in exasperation. She snarled, “I cannot believe those assholes!”
Some of the people crowded around her laughed, dispelling tension. Raji patted her on the shoulder.
Andy unclenched her fists. “Okay. I’m okay,” she told Raji. She turned to Cadell. “You okay?”
He nodded.
She ducked, looking up at him from under where he was looking down. “Are you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I was surprised. Shocked. It just shocked me.”
She whispered, “Do I need to frisk you?”
He smiled a little at that, though it was a wry smile. “No. If you’d like to, though, it’s fine with me.”
If there was anything that he could have said that should have stopped her, it was the suggestion that she would be molesting him in public.
An addict who was holding would say the most shocking thing he could think of to keep someone from finding his stash.
So she frisked him.
Cadell held his arms out and giggled for their audience while she ran her fingers down his ribs.
His body under his clothes had all the usual cords and thick muscles. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to tell if he had any new lumps, especially none the size of an aspirin. The remaining crowd drifted away down the corridor or into the atrium cafe for the wedding.
When everyone was safely ignoring them, Cadell caught her up in his arms. “I had to get to you. I hugged Emily on my way through, but I had to get to you.”
“You’re okay?” she asked.
“I didn’t touch it.”
“I’m so glad.”
“Come on.” He took her hand. “Let’s get married.”
They walked through the doors together, and Cadell kissed her quickly before he walked up to the front to stand near Dr. Jackson.
The hundreds of cafe tables were all packed with people sipping coffee or grabbing a late lunch while they attended the wedding. Andy was surprised that so many people had shown up. It’s hard to make a break in time when you’re on the floor.
A lot of Andy’s friends were there, and all her Indian friends had made it, because it was a community thing. You showed up for major events in your friends’ lives no matter what it took. They were all clustered near the front. A few of the women had changed into saris. Andy did not know how that had even happened.
A nurse pushed Emily in her wheelchair up the aisle between the cafe tables. Emily dropped rose petals from the bowl in her lap over the arms of the chair, her little fingers spreading wide as she released the red petals.
Raji grabbed her hand. “You ready?”
“Absolutely.”
All of them smiled at Andy as she walked up the aisle, their grins and giggles at her red scrubs and the whole situation making her laugh, too.
Everyone was smiling hugely except Dr. Jackson, who wore her black and gold Ph.D. graduation robe from the University of Iowa. She was only missing the square mortarboard hat, and she held copies of the Bible and a Bhagavad Gita. Her smile seemed more solemn. Her hands were clamped tightly around the books.
A small table beside her held a few small beakers of what appeared to be olive oil from the green tinge to the liquid. A piece of rolled gauze had been plunked in the oil like a wick, and the other end burned with a small, steady flame. Similar beaker-lamps sat on the tables with her Indian friends.
As Andy neared, she could see that Dr. Jackson’s eyes were red-rimmed, but Dr. Jackson drew a deep breath, smiled, and started speaking.
It was a short ceremony with one song by Killer Valentine, an acoustic version of “This Isn’t Love,” the song that Cadell had sung for her the previous morning when Andy had been not quite ready to bolt from her other wedding.
When Dr. Jackson asked about the rings, Andy stiffened, but Cadell turned to Emily, who was sitting in her wheelchair over to the side, and held out his hand.
Emily held up a small drawstring bag and gave it to him.
When he shook out the rings, he whispered to Andy, “We’ll get proper rings. I’ll get you a real ring with a big, honking diamond soon. I promise.”
Andy had seen Cadell play the guitar enough times, so many times in the past year, and she recognized the bronze, silver, and steel guitar strings that were braided and wound in intricate patterns to make the rings. A welded strip ran down the back of each one.
Her eyes stung. “Don’t you dare. This is the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen.”
He slipped it on her finger, and it fit perfectly, too.
Cadell had made himself one, too, a bigger one with more thick bass strings, and she slid it over his knuckles and onto his finger.
They kissed, his soft lips on hers one more time, and the people in the cafe clapped.
As they broke away, Andy caught a glimpse of Emily in the front row, who was dancing with excitement in her wheelchair.
The whole ceremony had taken about fifteen minutes.
Perfect.