instead a Tom Collins.
Casey was brown from the sun and T. wore faded jeans. The three-legged dog loped along beside them.
“Oh, dears, dears!” called Angela joyfully. “How was the Mexican wedding?”
Susan rose as they approached the table, rose and put down her napkin.
“Good,” said T., and rested a hand lightly on Casey’s shoulder. “It was good.”
7
She wanted to show she was happy about the wedding news. And for the most part she was, or she would be when she assimilated the information—she felt a kind of rising anticipation on Casey’s behalf—but there was also petty confusion. Her pride was injured as much as her feelings. She would have been grateful for anything—the most nominal warning, the most casual tip of a hat.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know,” said Casey.
They’d gone to get a bottle of white wine from the kitchen. Susan didn’t keep champagne in the house, so it would have to serve.
“But Angela did,” she said, rummaging in a drawer for a corkscrew and trying to contain the seed of resentment. No whining; keep it pure and simple, be remembered well.
“Oh yeah?” asked Casey. Give her credit: it sounded like real surprise.
“She told me you were on your honeymoon,” said Susan.
“Huh. Not exactly,” said Casey. “In the first place, I only went along for the ride. At the last minute. I wasn’t planning to. It was Baja—the Sea of Cortez. A whale stranding.”
“A whale stranding?” asked Susan, looking up from the wine.
“A mass stranding. There were over twenty of them. Beaked whales, which is a kind that dives deep, I guess? They look like dolphins to me, they have those kind of long noses. Anyway the biologists inspected some of the dead ones and said they had these hemorrhages around the ears. They think navy sonar caused them. You know, the navy does this sonar in the ocean? It’s for detecting diesel submarines, or something. So anyway the whale guys think the sound waves hurt whale brains. They get confused or they’re in pain and it disorients them and then they beach themselves. They lie there baking in the sun and dying. It’s one of the worst things I’ve seen. You wouldn’t believe the smell.”
“So what did you do?” asked Susan.
“We helped get some of them back in the water. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Answer: I sat on my crippled ass behind a folding table and handed out bottled water to the volunteers. Tame shit like that.”
“But it’s good,” said Susan softly. “I’m glad you did.”
“T.’s idea, he got on some kind of emergency phone tree for marine mammal rescue. He’s on a bunch of lists now. Your basic Good Samaritan shit. Some of it’s just giving out money. Like with the foundation. He just paid a bunch of poachers in Africa to stop shooting rhinos. They sell the horns to make into, like, fake Chinese aphrodisiacs. Now they’re getting a salary for guarding the rhinos instead of killing them. Who knew?”
“That sounds like a great idea,” said Susan drily.
“But with the whales I kinda got into it,” said Casey. “It was a life-or-death thing. It had—I don’t know. It wasn’t nothing.”
“You take the wine, OK? I’ll take the glasses,” said Susan, and handed down the bottle. She put five goblets on a tray and they started out of the kitchen, toward the patio. “So where did, you know, the getting-married part come in?”
“Spur-of-the-moment,” said Casey behind her. “That was his idea too.”
“You going to have a reception? At least a big party?”
“Fuck if I know,” said Casey happily. “Haven’t thought about it. He’s moving in, though. He likes my place better than his.”
“I like it better too.”
“He does things,” said Casey. “You know. I miss how walking on sand used to feel. I was telling him that, after the whale thing was over. We were on our way out of town, we’d driven down to the shore to look at it one more time. So he picked me up and carried me down to the waterline and put me down and he got down there with me. And then we kind of crab-walked. We walked on our elbows. There were waves, you know, and I can’t go fast on my elbows, I’m not built in the shoulders like Sal or someone. Anyway, I’m not going to say it was some romantic shit, because actually it ended up sucking. I mean after three minutes I was soaking and shivering, I had these scratches on