“Yeah, I’d like to knock her damned head off, only I don’t even know where she lives.”

“Well, as long as you never want to knock my head off.”

Jake was to fight a rising light-heavy named Bam-Bam Butterfield three days after the wedding, so they made it a little honeymoon. They drove to Denver in the De Soto, checked into a hotel downtown because Jake had given up his rented house, and walked the three blocks to the courthouse. Emaline wore a bottle green dress that belonged to Calla, Jake a tan suit, two-toned shoes, a straw boater. Bucky and his wife came along to act as witnesses. The justice of the peace was a twitchy little man with a stutter and a two-dollar rug laid cattywampus across his head. Emaline couldn’t take her eyes off that hairpiece. It looked like a muskrat pelt, as though it might come alive at any moment and sink its claws into the man’s skull. When it was time for her to say “I do,” Jake had to elbow her in the ribs to get her attention.

They all signed the papers, Jake paid the clerk three dollars. She was Mrs. Jake McCloskey, swallowed up in all that male storm and ego. She didn’t mind a bit. They stumbled out laughing into the glare of a Denver noon, the roar of traffic and blare of automobile horns, the reek of gasoline and diesel fuel, the shadows of the tall buildings, the rush of pedestrians in an almighty hurry. She wondered how people could actually live here without feeling all jumbled up inside. It pulled you in too many directions at once, so that you held nothing in your memory but odd, disconnected fragments, like a child’s worn shoe lying in a gutter or a cop lounging in the sunshine on the front fender of his patrol car, ogling the shopgirls as they passed by.

She had hoped that Bucky and his wife would come with them to put off the inevitable moment when she would be alone in that hotel room with her new husband, but Bucky said it was time for the newlyweds to be alone. Emaline and Jake celebrated with lunch at the Woolworth’s counter down the block, where Jake bought her a tuna-fish sandwich and a banana split with a cherry on top. He tried to talk her into a cherry Coke as well, but she said that a glass of water would do just fine, thank you, it was silly to waste a nickel on pop.