“What is it,” hissed Eloise, and Sadie could only manage to say, “It means f-f-fart.” Across the stable, Michael Valert stared at her with his exceptionally blue eyes, as amplified as his voice had been, and for a moment she felt ashamed but then, as though her soul had been turned over with a spade, the shame turned to jubilation. She could have stood and sung, she thought, though she could not sing. Indeed the bride and groom had cut the cheese. Fiona’s dress was scallion green and glorious. The Dutch had put too much gel in her hair.

That night they slept in the room of the dead man—“What if he died in this bed,” asked Jack, and Sadie, brave for once, said, “People have died everywhere, you can hardly avoid it, come here,” and tomorrow they would drive to the Dingle Peninsula, and she would think, over and over, I am going to drive off this road and ruin everything, but she never did, and she told him about the cat and dog, and explained to him that she’d thought his father had purposely made a funny joke—the bride and groom will now cut the cheese!—and they both laughed so hard she had to pull over to the side of the road, and when they recovered they drove out to Inch, where they were the only people on the beach, and so quickly and laughingly had sex, there on the damp sand, there was not a place in all of Ireland that wasn’t damp, but what else do you do when you are all alone, and liberated?

For now, when he came back to the table, he found Sadie laughing so hard she couldn’t speak, and all his family arranged around her. She was crying with laughter, and every time she tried to explain, she laughed harder, and his family looked more appalled. “What is it?” asked Jack, who felt suddenly the depths of his love for her, like Pavlov’s dogs, all of them in love with Pavlov.

“Why is that woman laughing,” Michael Valert said into the microphone.

“Tell her to stop!” said Eloise. “Make her stop!”

But he couldn’t, and she couldn’t either.

Proof