Outside in the afternoon, a scraggly fox is staring from a hiding place. San Francisco is changing, but there are still these wild places, and Bottle Grove is crawling with creatures who get braver when the sun goes down. The fox keeps staring, its eyes empty and sharp, and there is one woman in her late twenties, a substitute Lil was asked to find, and did, when one of the servers woke this morning with a flu, although the substitute looks pretty sickly herself, leaning against the wall between the bathroom doors, taking a quick swig from a bottle of cough syrup she returns to her pocket, her face sweaty and rosy as the caterers unfold the folding tables. If a story of two marriages can have a heroine, she’d be it, although nobody’s paying much attention to her now. You wouldn’t think she comes from money; she looks genuinely broke. You might think she’s a dreamy person, something often thought of attractive people whose eyes seem nowhere near the room, though maybe she’s just had too many unkind people in her surroundings, so she takes her eyes elsewhere. Maybe she’s scheming up something too. This is pretty much everyone, save a child, being born way across town to much screaming. No one is safe; this is one reason people get married. One-hundred-something guests will arrive in twenty-something minutes.

“Gail,” Lil says to the sickly substitute, “find an apron from Andrea in back, and Marvin—”

“Martin,” Martin says.

“Martin, then. The couple was specific with no paper napkins. So what are those?”

Martin is behind the bar and looks over at Stanford, who has a fist mid-twist on top of a stack of paper napkins so they would ruffle out in a pretty helix. “What are those?” Martin asks him.

Stanford hurries them back in a box. “Nothing, cap’n,” he says. “They were for my own personal use.”

Martin gives Lil a shrug and offers her a tester Happy Couple. There is mint flecked into shaved ice, there is a little lime. Lil turns it down like it’s a bug. “The glasses frost up,” Martin says. “People will want napkins.”

“People want a lot of things,” Lil says, frosty herself.

“The caterers will vanish the tables after dinner,” Martin says. “I’m just trying to keep everybody happy.”