“Okay, I give up,” Donald said, throwing the invitation he was holding down onto the table and leaning back in his chair until its joints creaked ominously. “Which is which?”

“Beats me.” Neiman’s had, I explained, not been kind enough to reward my little theft by providing me the answers on the back of each like a set of helpful flash cards.

Donald brought his chair abruptly forward, sat upright, and yawned passionately. He stretched his arms across the table, pushing the sample invitations aside as he did, and reached for my hands.

“Honey?” he said languidly.

“What?” I said flatly.

“May I speak frankly?”

“Must you?”

Had he ever spoken any other way? Couldn’t we, just once, I wondered, get through some task (eating dinner, washing dishes, having sex) without his need to speak frankly?

“Fine. Speak,” I said, waving my hand, giving up. Relieved now to have license to speak his mind (a technicality: he spoke his mind quite freely without my permission, as you’ll see), he smiled broadly, then brought his shoulders up in a fake cringe, as if to indicate that he felt just terrible about what he was going to say— even though, I knew, he didn’t.

“I’m bored,” he said, finally, his confession a guilty pleasure (he was a true Catholic, through and through). “I have to be honest, I’m having a hard time caring”—broad smile, shoulders up, fake cringe—“about how the invitations get printed. I mean, why are we doing this?”

I couldn’t have been more bored myself, but I wouldn’t have admitted it for the world. Instead, I let my mouth sag slightly into a sad pout.

“Doing what?” I asked. “Getting married or discussing the invitations?”

The phone rang.

“Discussing the invitations, of course,” he said. He reached to give my hands a reassuring little squeeze but I withheld them for effect. “I want to get married.”

The phone rang again.

“Because.” I was about to explain how costly engraving was compared to the other options and how since we couldn’t tell the difference anyway, we could, with a completely clear conscience, opt for the cheapest method of the three—lithography—but I was too distracted by the third ring of the telephone. On the beginning of the fourth ring he rose from the dining room table where we’d been sitting, took three steps over to the desk, leaned across it, turned back to look at me, and cringed—this time for real.

“It’s Adrienne.”

2

Donald mentioned Adrienne the first time we met. Told me that they were still very good friends. The way realtors will tell you what comes with a house they are selling and what does not. The refrigerator conveys; the window treatments do not convey. What he was telling me that day was clear: Adrienne conveyed.

We were on the Delta Shuttle one bleak blustery March afternoon a year ago, coming back from New York, where, coincidentally, we both had once lived, and going to Washington, where, coincidentally, we both now lived.