beds, thawing, and the grass was patchy, defeated.
Ana carried the cup in front of her, arm straight, thumb and pointer finger just skimming the rim, the other fingers curled into her palm with revulsion like a TV dad confronting his first dirty diaper.
Ana deposited the cup in a garbage bin. Following in her footsteps, James glanced over the bin’s edge. Pop everywhere, soaking old newspapers and fried chicken bones and dog shit and a single needle. He was resigned to this habit of Ana’s, this rage for clean.
He walked behind her to the parking lot. He knew that he cried too easily, and the crying acted like a defenceman’s shoulder check, sent her flying. But still he hoped, just a little, that she might break. Then he could be wonderful.
“Give me a second,” he said.
Ana sat in the car while James lit a cigarette, leaning on the hood, frowning. In the sky, a flag appeared. Wind must have loosed it from a pole and now it flapped above James’s head, moving closer, as if preparing to drop and cover him. And then the flag revealed itself to be, in fact, a flock of birds, diving down in a solid, waving page.
He flicked his cigarette butt into the garden.
In the car, Ana had a small white mint in her hand. As she held it out to him, James remembered all the women who had held out a hand to him over the years, uncurling a palm to reveal a joint, an ecstasy tab, a condom, a file folder.
“Let’s go,” said Ana.
The bride was eight months pregnant, and could not stop laughing. James had a few and he started laughing, too, until everyone between the rose walls of the hotel ballroom was laughing so hard that the Justice of the Peace, a tent of a woman, held up her hands.
“People! Come on, now! We have work to do! It’s supposed to be serious when you straight people get married!”
James and Ana were surprised to find that they had been seated at a table with the bride and groom. They had only known the couple a few months, though technically, James had known Sarah years ago, in university, years before Ana.
He’d made the first mention of her in the winter.
“This woman I sort of remember invited us to dinner.” Ana was emptying the dishwasher. “I forgot to tell you.”
“Who is it?” Ana ran through a mental list of all the women James had known before her.
James frowned. “Odd. I don’t remember her name.”
Ana held a clean mixing bowl in her hand. She rubbed its glass belly with a dishtowel.
James typed on his BlackBerry, bent thumbs clicking. He didn’t even keep it in a pocket anymore; it had become an extension of his hand, a beeping carbuncle. “It’s here. Sarah. Her name’s Sarah.”
“Can you help me put these away?”
He said: “Why are you drying dishes that are already dry?”
Ana told Sarah that she looked beautiful, and she meant it. Sarah’s dress was a dive-able sea green, and this fishy aspect continued with her cropped, glossy black hair.
“Are you appalled by the wedding-ness of this wedding? I think I am.” Sarah pointed at a string of white Christmas lights winding around the windows overhead. They were in a basement ballroom; the small rectangular windows sat up high, near the ceiling, peeking out into bushes. Their shape and secret location near the ground – windows she would only notice if she stopped to tie her shoe – made Ana think of an old-fashioned prison on a main street in a small town. She expected to see ankles and feet pass by outside, through the shrubbery.
Sarah patted Ana’s knee and grinned. Of all the people here, Sarah had chosen her to lean in to. Ana felt cozy.
“Something comes over you when you plan a wedding,” Sarah used a conspiratorial voice. “You start giving a shit about things you absolutely should not give a shit about.”
Ana laughed, and told Sarah about the night before her own wedding, when she stayed up until three a.m. tying bags of tea with white ribbon because the parting gift CD that James had made seemed suddenly inadequate.
“Okay, that’s pretty bad. You’ve made me feel better,” said Sarah, rubbing her hand over her stomach, which jutted out in front of her in a perfect circle, like a prosthetic. Ana did not flinch. She decided that she liked this loud, pregnant woman, a conclusion she hadn’t quite reached over the prior few weeks. Ana