She used to swim or go on the mill two or three times a week, but since the election she works out almost every day. She needs to burn off a morning film of despair. She avoids the news stations on the monitors hung from the gym’s ceiling. To make forty minutes pass beneath her notice today, she watches a show about women buying wedding dresses. Two brides are being featured on this episode, both much older than women Cate would put in the virgin bracket, older with a bit of wear and tear. In photos, their fiancés look like bar bouncers. These weddings are not their firsts, but both of them say they want to feel like a princess on their big day. The bridal party of friends and/or relatives tears up as their bride emerges from the fitting room in a sequence of strapless gowns. One is fixed on the idea of “bling,” and they find her something with a cascade of rhinestones down the front. The other wants “a full mermaid,” which is apparently beyond her budget. The wedding party shares a moment of sorrow.

Maybe, Cate thinks, this show seems insane to her because she is queer. Maybe if she were straight, she’d be thinking about a full mermaid and should she get a second dress for the reception (a chronic consideration on the show). Maybe queer weddings will eventually get pumped up like this. She tries to remember her wedding to Graham. She was twenty. He was so different from anyone else she’d met—playful, original. They’d have sex, then talk through the night about art and life. They floated big ideas. This was before Pand-a-Rama!, before all the money. They had the ceremony in a friend’s apartment. She wore a sundress from the Gap. He wore jeans and a thrift-shop dinner jacket. Someone took pictures, but she doesn’t know where they have drifted off to. Pictures weren’t so important then; they weren’t so much a validation of experience. Back then, you had experience, later on memories, then you came across a small pile of old snapshots in the back of a drawer and thought how skinny everyone was back then.

The belt slows to a stop. The guy on the next treadmill is gone; so are the little girls on the closed-circuit TV. The daycare room is empty.

When she gets home, the little lobby of her three-flat is stacked hip-high with Amazon envelopes, squishy mailers, and boxes. She brings up as many as she can. She drops them to the floor to unlock the front door. Sailor’s nose is in the space created by her opening the door an inch or two. He licks her hand—more specifically, he licks her phantom fingers. He gives her this exact same lick at one point or another in any given day. He is probably the most empathic creature she will ever know.