Her voice stops mid-trail, a lazy pioneer. “Jesus,” Martin says. “Is everyone drunk?”

“It wasn’t me drunk,” the woman says. “It was a real noise. But what is happening here?”

“Somebody rolled out the barrel,” Padgett says, and gives the mouthwash to Martin. The woman cranes her neck a little, if it’s good she wants some. They all regard each other, in the woods outside the wedding. There is an age that feels like a last chance. All of them know it. They are all exactly the same age—twenty-seven, thirty, thirty-two—and when it isn’t worrying them, they worry that they aren’t worrying. It is too old, just a little, to be drunk at day. To be at a wedding without having been wed. The world is marrying off and sobering up, Padgett thinks, and here our occupation is that a barrel has gone missing. People our age encircled the globe when no one knew it was a globe, raised nine children in a shack full of grime and death. This city is full of heroes our age, sitting on piles of fortune from old ideas—the taxi, the bed-and-breakfast, the radio—jazzed up in snappy meetings over thoroughbred coffee, but we, now, are lifting a blanket in a van to uncover a space we know has no barrel, to see if there’s a barrel in it. Futile and small, the whole everyday situation, vainglorious and screened-in, and the real injustice, if it’s injustice, is that Padgett knows where the barrel is.

“And what is this barrel?” the hairdo woman asks, when Martin has explained in one more sentence. “What is in it?”

“Drink,” Martin says, which deflates them all. How silly they are, how worthless and lagging. The arrival of the bride makes the division clearer, to the bride most of all. Rachel almost-Nickels peers around the back, grateful she is not any of them.

“Martin, it’s you.”

“It’s me,” the barman says cheerily. “Just grabbing the last of everything. This is Padgett, she’s helping out today. Padgett, this is Rachel Nickels.”

“Not quite yet,” Rachel says, with her borrowed watch and a little squealish noise.

“You’re taking his name?” Padgett asks.

“And how,” Rachel says, like a big salesman. “I’m just trying to stay out of the way. I don’t know you.”

Her eyes have stopped and faded a little on the hairdo woman, who introduces herself; Nina is her name.

“Well, we’ll have aqua fresca for earlycomers out in the field in a minute,” the bride says, her voice cross-cultural on fresca.

Padgett drops her end of the blanket. “I have to get an apron on.”

“Is there something you were here for, Rachel?” Martin asks, but the bride is already saying no.