“My hair is done, the flowers look great, my fiancé has stopped fiddling with his music lists. I’m thirty-one and I’m getting married. It’s a life-changing experience, so no, that’s it, that’s all I want.”

“She did not,” Padgett says, when Rachel and her dress go inside, “really talk like that, did she?”

Martin tells Padgett she did.

“People shouldn’t talk like that at all.”

“They’re the happy couple,” Martin says. “She’s actually been very calm and nice for six months, with me.”

“I don’t care,” Padgett says. “You don’t wander around saying you’re life-changing.”

“At the wedding I think it’s OK,” Nina says.

Padgett kicks the dusty ground like a kid not getting ice cream. You’re on your own, she thinks to herself, in this life, lately. “I still say it’s wrong,” she says, but Martin picks up ice and starts to hustle. Nina gives Padgett a little look of reluctant camaraderie but wanders back off. Padgett listens to the startling crinkle of something in the trees. Bottle Grove has eucalyptus, the leaves long and papery when they fall, and Padgett, believing the noise to be nothing but leaves, stands for a minute alone in the whispery space, sad and prickled from the happiness of others, while she straggles staring at her future, imminent and inevitable and shaped like an apron. She can’t believe it.