In a moment the tail convulsed and gave a triumphant wiggle of ecstasy and the herring flickered from their sight into the deep water of the pond.

He held her tightly to him.

“Adam,” she said into his shoulder, “I want to give birth to a child.”

“There’s no reason why you can’t.”

“Will you let me?”

“Let’s get married right away. Today.”

“What about your father?”

“We’ve got to live our own lives. Until I can afford to take care of both of you he’ll just have to take care of himself. I should have known that before.”

He kissed her. Another herring plopped over, an athlete, and flashed up the final ladder as if riding an elevator.

She was laughing and crying at the same time again. “You don’t know anything at all,” she said. “You have to wait three days to get married.”

“We’ve got plenty of time,” he said, thanking God and the battered fish.

On Tuesday morning she walked down Beacon Hill and over the Fiedler footbridge to the Esplanade, where she felt it had all begun. At the river’s edge she opened her purse and took out the pill box. She threw it as hard as she was able, and the fake mother-of-pearl flashed in the sun before it hit the water. It was a lousy throw but it would serve. She sat down on a bench by the water’s edge and was pleased by the thought of the little box in the soft-flowing water of the Charles, perhaps nuzzled curiously from time to time by a mud turtle or a fish. Maybe it would be moved by the tidal currents out into Boston Harbor, to be found by somebody at some far distant date on the Quincy shore, along with sand dollars and mussels and the shell of a crab and the jaw of a dogfish and a sandworn returnable Coke bottle and placed somewhere under glass as a relic of homo sapiens a long time ago, as far back as the twentieth century.

That afternoon, as if somehow she knew it was a wedding present, Bertha Krol knocked on their door for the first time and returned the plant as mutely as she had accepted it. She had not thrown the avocado out of the window. Furthermore, the foliage no longer drooped, although nothing they could think of would induce her to speak when Gaby asked her what she had fed it. Beer, Adam thought.

They were married on Thursday morning, with Spurgeon and Dorothy standing up for them. When they got home from City Hall the first thing Gaby did was rip from under the mailbox the tape bearing her maiden name. The missing strip left a pale unweathered mark which she cherished as long as they lived in the small apartment on Phillips Street.