Clasping her father’s arm at the church threshold, Gia looked down the aisle to her younger brother, Salvatore, waiting for her at the altar. The priest gave a nod and with gentle fluster the few wedding guests in pews stood up, her mother, Nonna, Taddeo’s parents and family. Wall-candelabra smoke ghosted up the plaster, and the seventeenth-century crucifix behind the altar watched from its blood-red backdrop. Gia thought of Taddeo and what he might be doing in Australia just then. Yet it was impossible to conjure much substance of him or Australia from the still pictures she’d seen.
Angelo went to step forward but she baulked. ‘Come,’ he murmured, with his usual fatherly gentleness. ‘Who falls in water doesn’t drown, but who falls badly will.’
She squeezed his arm and let him lead her onward, knowing she’d miss her father’s quaint way of talking in verse and proverb, an unfulfilled storyteller who hadn’t had the opportunity to learn to write.
Salvatore, as Taddeo’s proxy groom, looked so swamped in their father’s old wedding suit that Gia almost let out a nervous laugh. Drawing up close to him, she smelt the minty, sage waft of wormwood bunches their mother had stored with the suit to guard it from moths. His eyes met hers. There was a sheen on his forehead. Her own hands felt moist. She turned as Angelo stepped back. The bobby pins her mother had used with zeal to keep the veil circlet on Gia’s thick curls prickled her scalp. Many girls marry this way now, she reminded herself. And they did, with so many young men gone…
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