It had not been covetousness she'd felt; the impulse had had more to do with cleaning up. Afterward she'd felt a nervous sensation of relief, as if some promise of bad luck—some debt—had been forestalled but not fully answered. Now she had the address book, this insubstantial thing, and she wasn't sure what to do with it. She couldn't give it to Billy, but she found that she couldn't quite bring herself to throw it away, either. She'd risked so much for it. She removed the price tag and tucked the little book into her top drawer, thinking maybe she'd give it to someone someday. Eventually, she'd be able to put it to some kind of use.
Since then, she'd stolen any number of little things, and always felt the same queasy satisfaction, as if she'd risked herself to create a little more cleanliness and order. The stealing was a minor aspect of her life. It occupied roughly the same interior space a dull hobby would, or the occasional perusal of National Geographic, with its simultaneous suggestions that the regions of the earth were unutterably strange and yet, in the final analysis, all more or less alike. Mary lost herself in the plans for Susan's wedding, which demanded endless decisions right down to the rosebuds on the cake. The wedding was so much, it weighed so heavily on her lungs, that she finally asked her doctor if something might be wrong with her and was given a prescription for pale yellow pills. She took a pill on the day of the wedding itself, and was surprised that for an instant, as Susan stood at the altar with Todd, she felt a stab of anger sharp enough to penetrate the pill's sweet flotation. The anger was sourceless—just nerves, she'd tell herself later—and seemed to have to do with Susan's white dress, with the placid handsomeness of Todd's square face as he bent to kiss her. Nerves, Mary thought, and the inevitable fears on a mother's part about her daughter's happiness, given all she herself had learned about what can go wrong.
The wedding was flawless, except for the guests. It had of course been necessary to invite the people who worked for Constantine, and they were for the most part boisterous men in cheap, outdated suits, escorting wives who were variously cowed or shrill but were, in every instance, badly dressed. With the help of Todd's father, Mary had rented the ballroom at the country club, and had had it impeccably decorated with urns of white lilacs and centerpieces of cream-colored roses. She'd enlisted a caterer to provide Rock Cornish game hens, wild rice, and French-cut string beans with slivered almonds for over two hundred. She had made no mistakes, and now into her white-and-cream reception marched a brigade of foremen who'd been hired specifically because they could bully other men into building houses as quickly and cheaply as possible. They were married to just the kind of women you'd expect: brassy, in loud dresses and too much jewelry, their hair teased and tortured into great stiff piles on top of their heads. Todd's mother and his two aunts wore simple page boys and dressed in pure colors, and Mary suffered over her own French twist. Her dress was frosted pink—she silently thanked God she had decided against a ruffle at the bodice. As she danced with Billy, who was straight-backed and self-conscious in his blue gabardine suit, she watched Susan laughing with two of her bridesmaids, and it seemed that Susan had gone to another country, where all the girls were effortlessly thin and beautiful and all the boys had futures sturdy as suspension bridges. Even through the graceful hush of the pill she felt, again, a little storm of emotion that might have been anger and might have been fear. She didn't want either feeling, not on a day like this. She concentrated on her daughter's beauty, her remarkable ease and charm. This one, at least, was safe. Mary hummed along with the band, a few bars of “Begin the Beguine.” She said to Billy, “Seems like the wedding's a success.”
He said, “I guess any wedding's a success, huh? I mean, as long as they really get married, it's worked.”
“If that was all that mattered, they could've gone to a justice of the peace and saved your father about five thousand dollars.”
“C'mon. Did this shindig really cost five grand?”
“You'd be surprised how things add up. You kids have no idea.”
He whistled.