Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [58]
She held me there a long time. Maybe three minutes. When I exhaled, I didn’t feel a thing.
19
The sun poked its head up over Fort Sumter, then crawled up the Battery as we talked and dreamed and tried to figure out what we were going to tell her parents. I could take or leave the big Charleston wedding—I wanted whatever Abbie wanted. But it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that she and her mother would need a mediator to navigate the details of a wedding—especially one they hadn’t agreed to. They would have come to blows. And heaven help us if her father got involved.
A city bus slowed to a stop behind us, its brakes metal on metal, and picked up a young mother and pigtailed girl wearing a pink backpack and pink shoes. The air brakes hissed, the bus pulled off and Abbie placed her palms on my face. “Let’s leave right now.”
“What, today?”
“Right this second.”
“Don’t you want to plan something?”
“Doss, I’ve wanted to marry you since I first laid eyes on you. Now marry me right this minute.”
“Honey, no minister or priest in his right mind will just up and marry us on the spot.”
“Doss, I don’t have to marry in a church. God knows my heart.” She laughed. “He’s probably tired of hearing about you—I’ve been asking Him for you most my whole life.”
The thought of that struck me. “Really?”
She held my face in her hands. “And I loved you long before I met you.”
There it is again. That thing that is my wife. “Where, then? Who?”
“I don’t know, but you’d better get creative.” She tapped her watchless left wrist. “The clock is ticking.”
“But, Abbie, I don’t have a ring.”
She put her hand on her hip. “Well, you should’ve planned ahead.” She chewed on her lip. “I have plenty. We’ll used one of mine.”
“I’m not marrying you with one of your own rings.”
“You got any other options?”
“Well…this is Charleston. And it’s the Friday following Thanksgiving. National holiday. Biggest shopping day of the year.”
“If we go shopping around here, word will spread and we wouldn’t make it out of the first store before my folks met us at the second.”
“What about someplace where we could sort of look without really looking?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Slave market.”
“Perfect.”
We walked up the Battery and north to the slave market where the women were already busy at work on their baskets. Several blocks long and maybe a half a block wide, today it serves as something akin to an outdoor mall. Vendors were unlocking their cases and spreading wares across their tables. Inside was a combination flea market, craft store, antique shop and sports memorabilia bazaar. It was the last place in the world that a lady like Abbie should have been shopping for a ring. The brick walls were those see-through kind that let the breeze through but still housed the bazaar inside. We walked in hand in hand. “You know,” she said, “slaves were never actually sold here.”
“Then why do they call it the slave market?”
“Because it’s the market where slaves were unloaded off the ships before they were hauled off to the auction blocks elsewhere. Later, it was used by slaves to sell their goods.” She thought a moment. “Although, I suppose from the slaves’ point of view, it’s merely a matter of semantics. A transaction took place somewhere.”
“How do you know all this?”
She twirled and sang softly, “‘I’m Charleston born and Charleston bred and when I die…’”
“I know, I know.”
She pulled on my arm and led me to a display where a lady was selling sterling silver flatware. Most of it was called Old Orange Blossom. In a case on the far end of her display, she had a dozen or so old, plain silver bands. Abbie pulled her sunglasses down over her eyes and began looking.
The lady asked, “Can I help you?”
Abbie pointed. “Are those silver?”
The lady shook