When the cake was cut, everyone got back to eating and drinking. Tomorrow, she thought, they will be heaving on their toilets. She saw Maud, flushed and merry, laughing with Ruth, and thought of Magnus, waiting for her in his little cabin, like some horrifically large baby bird a child keeps in a shoebox. Miss Kelly slapped and pistoned her knees in naïve anticipation of the music as the band warmed up, a gob of icing upon her lip. There, barefoot and dreamy, was Otto’s benighted daughter, Shannon, who would always be the Raped Girl. And right next to Annie, her mom, over whom a lazy sensual suggestiveness was draped like a steamed towel, who was a cleavage in a dirty robe, out of which rose the scent of perfume and cigarettes and sweat and sour milk. But at the heart of that soft flesh, hard and bitter as a pit, was the woman who wished the Nazis had finished the job. Perhaps that’s why the crying women troubled Annie so much. Weren’t those who were capable in the midst of their miserable married lives to cry with joy at a bride also the ones who leered and grinned beneath the lynched men? They needed only the right sign to release a ready passion. And yet Annie felt insubstantial beside them. They were the weight of water, not the wave. Why was life so hard? She loved her mother, her father, her brother, but they were cowards. And she wanted to forgive herself enough for not being quite human, for being the hollow bride, to allow herself the emotional right to look at them and think, cowards. But this was not what a girl was meant to be thinking on her wedding day.

The band began. She and Lew had the first dance and the rest then flooded onto the floor. After a little while, Annie noticed that Nora wasn’t dancing and looked miserable, so she went over and took the seat beside her.

“Are you okay?” she said.

Nora nodded unconvincingly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Me and Raj broke up.”

“What? Why?”

“Said he wasn’t ready. Miss Winters hates me. I bet she told him not to.”

“I’m so sorry.” Though Annie rubbed Nora’s shoulder and said as many encouraging things as she could think of, she couldn’t quell a sense of exhilaration: Raj was no longer engaged. Hope returned to life: a ridiculous and selfish hope, she knew, but she couldn’t help feeling it. All at once she adored Nora, adored everyone.

“I’m going to be an old maid,” Nora declared miserably.

“No, you won’t.” Shifting her chair closer, Annie put her arms around her friend’s neck. “If I were a boy I’d marry you right now. You’re wonderful and beautiful and scrumptious and delicious and gorgeous.”