The narrator and Emily marry in Elba shortly before his deployment to Iraq, turning a practical proposal and a private understanding of their uncertain future into a brief, emotionally overwhelming ceremony. Their wedding is both a commitment and a farewell: they marry in secret, without rings, and part in tears at the airport soon afterward.

Background and Decision

By the autumn of the wedding, the couple had known each other for two years. They felt they had grown older and more self-sufficient: both had jobs and savings, and Emily would turn twenty-one the following month. During a rainy weekend in Elba, they spent the days lying down and sleeping, then drove at night through the dark autumn landscape. The narrator remembers the bare trees, black sky, and streetlights as beautiful in a way that hurt, giving the decision to marry an atmosphere of tenderness edged with sadness.

Emily proposed marriage this time, presenting it as a practical choice before the narrator left for Iraq. Marriage would mean better pay for him and health insurance coverage for her. He welcomed the practical reasoning, but also emphasized his desire to marry Emily. The decision carried its own qualification: Emily said they would divorce, and he agreed. The marriage therefore begins not with a promise of permanence but with both the urgency of imminent separation and an acknowledged limit on what they expect from the relationship.

The Secret Ceremony

Emily and the narrator were married by a justice of the peace in Elba on the Tuesday after Veterans Day. The wedding had been kept from everyone; Emily did not want it known. On the preceding Friday evening, Joe and Roy had driven from Cleveland to visit. Joe headbutted the narrator in the face, unaware of the planned marriage; the narrator describes the blow as friendly rather than hostile. By the time of the ceremony, his nose was broken and blood marked his windbreaker.

They had no wedding rings. Emily wore a blue mechanic’s jacket with the name MARIO on its front pocket. The narrator recalls looking at her as angelic and remembers that, for at least a few minutes, they felt like the two most beautiful people in the world. The image is intimate and makeshift rather than ceremonial: a bloodied groom, a work jacket, no rings, and a marriage known only to the couple. Its emotional force comes from their shared conviction in that moment, not from public recognition or elaborate ritual.

Farewell and Significance

After the wedding, Emily drove the narrator to the airport. They stayed in her car in the parking lot, crying until it was time for him to leave. The sequence compresses marriage and separation into the same departure: the practical arrangement they had made before his deployment became real just as they had to say goodbye.

The scene’s tenderness is inseparable from its uncertainty. The couple’s happiness is described as absolute but fleeting, while their prior agreement to divorce prevents the wedding from being read as a simple assurance of lasting security. Secrecy, the absence of rings, and the airport farewell make the marriage feel less like a public beginning than a private interval before war. Its defining contradiction is that the narrator is about to leave Emily, yet is also, in his words, getting to marry her.