17

Driving. There had always been so much of it. It was always the great equalizer in their stretch of Texas, where your vehicle wasn’t merely a necessity but an appendage, a product of evolution. You drove when things were far away—in the country most things are—and you drove when things were close, because the driver’s seat was always closer. When Mary Alice and Katherine were growing up, the driving age was sixteen, but just like everyone else they knew, they learned to drive at fourteen. “Just in case,” was always the reason, no matter who was doing the reasoning. Just in case you need to drive somewhere and get help if an adult got hurt. Just in case you need to drive home when an adult has had one too many. Just in case you need to help out on the ranch while your daddy’s operating the hay baler. Just in case you need to run to the grocery store while Mom’s stirring something on the stove.

Parents in Billington believed that certain skills, like shooting guns and drinking beer and driving cars, should be taught at ages below government recommendations because, in their estimation, curiosity would inevitably get the better of an adolescent. So why not treat it like an education and cut mischief off at the pass? Better to teach your child about drinking responsibly than have them show up to a party and learn how to shotgun from a third-year senior named Hank.

Mary Alice and Katherine’s father taught them how to drive on the evening of their respective fourteenth birthdays, both of which came in the dead of summer, when the idea of school was impossibly far away. Though the lessons were three years apart, they happened in exactly the same way, with the same reliable Ford F-100 Ranger, the same empty Billington ISD parking lot, and the same can of Budweiser in Edward Parker’s left hand shared between the driver and the father. (Best to do two life lessons at once, their father thought. He was nothing if not efficient.) They were pros in just under ninety minutes, figuring out how to shift without stalling the engine or cracking the gears just as magic hour sank in, and both Mary Alice and Katherine had identical memories of the drive home, with their daddy in the passenger seat, finishing off his second beer of the lesson while looking proudly at their smiling faces, in profile, of course, eyes on the road, staring triumphantly at the purple-orange glow of a Texas sunset.

Both of them would only buy manual cars for the rest of their lives. They would tell people it was because they found shifting gears to be more satisfying, but in reality it was that it reminded them of their dad, whom they loved so much that even mentioning his name was enough to bring them both to tears. Their lives had expanded in different directions, but when you followed the stories down to their roots, you’d find them joined in a million different ways, a knotty tangle of memories covered in years of dirt and two deep green canopies.

The thing is, their relationship had actually gotten better in those years before Samuel died. They’d begun calling each other more, slowly trying to mend the gaping wounds slashed open at Katherine’s wedding some ten years prior by pretending it had never happened. But it did, and it was the inescapable fact of their lives together; a memory they could never outrun. It was 1982. Michael hadn’t been born, Samuel hadn’t grown distant, and Mary Alice hadn’t lost her sister to the worst man she’d ever met.

The morning of the wedding, the first below-ninety-degree day of summer in weeks, was actually quite lovely, as Mary Alice remembered it anyway. She woke up beside Samuel without the assistance of a tinny beep at 7:00 a.m., curled up in a ball on his side as usual, flipped off her alarm so it wouldn’t stir him half an hour later, and crept downstairs to put on a pot of coffee. As it percolated, she unzipped her dress from the bag hanging in the coat closet, just to look at it again.

“The world’s first beautiful maid-of-honor dress,” Samuel said when he first saw it. He was right, too. The cut was simple—two small straps, a bit of ruffling along the bustline, and an ever-so-fitted cinch down a largely straight side. The salesperson had called it an “upscale maxi” when she tried it on at the boutique in San Antonio; whatever the name, Mary Alice knew it was the only kind of dress in which she ever really felt comfortable. “I can’t believe she let you pick it,” he said, gently rubbing the fabric between his thumb and index finger.

“She didn’t,” Mary Alice said the first time she unveiled it, waiting for him to make eye contact. “Katherine chose the whole thing herself. Knew my measurements, too, somehow. I didn’t even get the chance to try anything else on, just walked in and found this ready for me. It fits me like a glove without a bit of tailoring.” The rest of the bridesmaids, Katherine’s friends from college, were in over-tulled, ruffled disasters that appeared to have been dyed in a dehydrated elephant’s urine. It was a dark, worrying color you could almost smell. But not hers. As she stared at her dress, its bright and flattering pastel lemon almost glowing in the early-morning sun, Mary Alice was actually excited to put it on. More than that, she was excited to be seen in it beside her sister.

The wedding was at 2:00 p.m. It would include a full mass, not because Katherine or her fiancé, Jonathan Yancey, were believers but because there was no way out of it. Mary Alice’s had been nearly identical; so was Maria’s. And Laurie’s and Betty’s and Wilma’s. There was always the option of flying to Spain—or even Las Vegas—and eloping, that sort of break in tradition would have been frowned upon but ultimately forgiven, but Katherine wanted the big to-do. She wanted people she knew in the audience, not drunken strangers. And in Billington, Texas, if she wanted to be seen in a beautiful dress beside her beautiful husband and walk from table to table being given the same wonderfully satisfying compliments over and over for the better part of eight hours, she would have to get married in a church. An hour listening to a priest drone on and on about the sanctity of the sacrament and a woman’s place as her husband’s property would be easy enough to stomach; she’d heard it all before.

Mary Alice’s call time was 10:00 a.m. at their parents’ house in the middle of town, a two-minute drive away. She was told to come “naked,” meaning messy hair, no makeup, and with the dress in the bag. They would have champagne while one of Katherine’s bridesmaids, a stylist with a salon in Houston, would do the entire bridal party’s hair and makeup. It was the bridesmaid’s gift to Katherine, and Katherine accepted without taking much time to appreciate the sacrifice of doing everyone’s hair and makeup, including her own, in less than four short hours. Mary Alice dreaded the whole, extended ordeal, but she pushed her worries aside and arrived with what would have seemed like a positive attitude to anyone who didn’t know her too well.

When she walked into the room filled with beautiful, laughing strangers, she felt ancient. No more than four years was between her and any of the other members of the wedding party—one of them was nearly her own age—but Mary Alice was the only one from Billington, a small town the girls found so novel and strange. To them, she was a creature trapped in formaldehyde, someone to observe with a curious condescension but never actually know. So, yes, she entered the room with a positive attitude, but it disappeared by 10:01.

“Can you at least pretend like you’re having a good time?” Katherine muttered through a gritted smile, pulling a bottle of the cheap, too-sweet sparkling wine from a beer bucket and topping her off. She’d pulled her into the kitchen so they could have a minute away from the others, who started shrieking when “Jack & Diane” began playing on the radio. “This is a good day, remember? Your little sister? Getting married? This may not happen more than, I don’t know, three or four times, tops!” Mary Alice cracked a grin. No one had ever annoyed her more, and yet no one was better at making her laugh.

“I’m sorry; you know I’m not good in groups,” Mary Alice said.

“Bullshit,” Katherine said. “You’re great in groups. You just have to be the boss. You’re a fucking teacher.”

“That’s different.”

“Just think of them as your freshman algebra students, only . . . dumber.”

Mary Alice smiled and grabbed her sister’s shoulder, pulling her in for a hug. “I’m thrilled to be here, just so you know. And I won’t be a grump anymore.”

“Thank you.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“What do you mean?”

“About your wedding? To the man of your dreams?” Mary Alice tapped Katherine’s forehead with her finger, a playful gesture that put a short-lived smile on her face.

“You know, no one’s asked me that all week. Not one person has asked me how I’m feeling. They just tell me how they think I’m feeling. ‘You must be so excited,’ or ‘You must be so exhausted,’ or ‘You must feel so lucky.’ ” Mary Alice felt like she had just been complimented and scolded at the same time.

“I’m sorry, Kath,” she said. “I was just making conversation.”

“Well, I’m feeling good. I am. Weird, but good. Nervous, but everyone’s nervous on their wedding day, right?”

Mary Alice nodded, and when that didn’t seem to shake the daze on her sister’s face, she tapped Katherine’s forearm. “Hey. Everything’s going to be fine. This is a wonderful day.”

Katherine gave her sister an appreciative smile just as John Cougar wailed once again about life going on and a voice from the other room cried out, “Katherine, get back here! Christine’s doing the robot!”

“You go ahead,” Mary Alice said. “I need to call Sam anyway and make sure he’s managing.”

“Ugh, he’s so helpless sometimes.”

“He’s not helpless, he’s just . . .” Mary Alice said, twisting her mouth. “Helpless, yeah. I guess he’s a little helpless. All men are. You’ll find that out soon enough.”

Katherine bolted off and Mary Alice grabbed the rotary above the sink. She dialed their number and waited, feeling a little light-headed off the two glasses of champagne as the phone rang one, two, three, four, five times before Samuel answered, out of breath. “Hello?”

“Hello, Sammy, it’s me, how’s everything at the house?”

“Well, the kitchen is on fire and I can’t find my suit, but other than that, I’m doing just fine.”

“Ha-ha, but seriously. Is everything sorted? You’re all set?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Don’t ‘yes, dear’ me ever again. Your pocket square? Black socks? Black shoes, not the brown ones?”

“Yes, it’s all laid out on the bed.”

“What time are you getting to church?”

“Is this a quiz?”

“Yes. What time are you getting to church?”

“No later than one o’clock, so twelve-fifty.”

“Great.”

“How’s the war room?”

“A nightmare, but fine.”

“And Dr. Strangelove?”

Mary Alice laughed, then turned closer toward the phone to make sure her back was toward the noise. “She’s good, actually,” Mary Alice said, twisting the tight curls of the phone cord between her fingers. “Her friends are awful, or not awful, but different. And she seems, I don’t know, happy.”

“It is her wedding day,” Samuel said in a deadpan. “That’s the bare minimum.”

“I know, but it’s still nice to see.” They both paused, and Mary Alice broke the silence with a hiccup. “Sorry; champagne.”

“OK, so does that mean it’s pencils down? I passed?”

“Sure, sure. See you soon. Love you.”

“Love you.”

Linda had a surprisingly gruff approach to hair and makeup, but given the delicate beauty of the final product, Mary Alice wondered if Katherine had told her friend to be extra vigilant about her own makeup. She imagined Katherine whispering something like, “I know this was supposed to be a gift, but let me know if you need an hourly rate for this one.” Mary Alice’s hair was pulled and curled and burned to a crisp; her face was shellacked and painted and sprayed with a sticky topcoat that made her feel like she was being turned to stone. But when Linda held a hand mirror in front of her face after the forty-five-minute process, she gasped at the reflection and leaned in for a hug.

“Are you crying?” Katherine asked. “Oh my God, you’re crying! And now I’m crying!”

They were both crying—Mary Alice because she felt she looked better than she had at her own wedding, and Katherine because she felt proud of herself for doing a good thing for her sister. The two of them hugged each other, then Linda, then everyone else. The wedding was in ninety minutes, and they were both delighted and drunk.

At church, the photographer, a jittery, balding man named Brian Brinks, introduced himself to the bride-to-be. His handshake was cold and soft and limp, and Katherine noticed his socks were as pink as his tie and pocket square and cheeks. “I’ll be doing the snapping today, but just pretend I’m not here,” he said. “Unless, of course, I scream your name like a hyena. In which case, you better get your ass over to me pronto because you won’t like me when I’m mad.” Brian turned to Mary Alice and gave her a big hug. “How you doing, hon?”

“I’m busting, Brian. Can’t wait to watch my little sister get married.”

“Don’t you just love love? I know I do.”

Katherine nodded and offered him a large, forced smile, then turned her head to Mary Alice, who held back a laugh. They led the bridesmaids through the grounds toward the hall, where they would remain corralled as the guests showed up and the groom’s party took their places at the front of the church.

“The photographer’s a bit much, isn’t he?” Katherine said, watching Brian chat with the bridesmaids as her left eyelid narrowed as if focusing on the recipient of her judgment. “I hope you two were right about him.”

“We’ve known him since college. He’s a sweetheart, and Sammy says he’s the busiest wedding photographer in Dallas. Plus, I heard about the discount you got, so don’t even start complaining.”

“I’m not complaining! I just think it’s funny, imagining the two of you being friends with someone like him. Samuel especially.”

“Why? What’s funny about that?”

“Oh, come on, Mary Alice. Don’t be dense. He’s very . . .” she said, choosing her next word carefully. “Loud.”

“It’s not like all your friends from college are pillars of normalcy and tradition. He’s a sweet man. And I’m sure you’ll regret making jokes once the photos are developed.”

“I guess,” Katherine said, sinking into the decades-old couch in a drafty room toward the front of the hall. “I haven’t been in here in forever. Remember how much I hated CCD?” A chalkboard filled one wall, and a dozen old school desks were pushed into the corner alongside a chipped upright piano. Folding chairs formed a semicircle around a table in the center of the room, where someone had placed a bouquet of flowers, cups, and a pitcher of water.

“Everyone hated CCD,” Mary Alice said, flopping down beside her. “Who wants to spend their entire Sunday in church?”

“You didn’t complain back then,” Katherine purred as the rest of the bridal party entered and turned their noses up at the dusty old room.

“You know, it is possible to not enjoy something and to also keep your mouth shut about it.”

Katherine rolled her eyes playfully and called to her friends, “Sorry it’s so sad in here.”

“So this is where you used to go to church?”

“Well, this isn’t the church. The church is the churchlike building next door. This is the hall.”

“Which is, what, a school?”

“No. They had dances here, Sunday school, weddings, funerals—pretty much any town event ended up with people eating or drinking or dancing here one way or another. The town picnic, too. I had my first kiss at one of those.”

“At the picnic?” Mary Alice said, extending her neck. “You never told me that.”

“Gerald Harbison.”

“Gerald Harbison!”

“Who’s Gerald Harbison, and will he be at the wedding?”

“He’s happily married now. I think they just celebrated two years.”

“Are any of the men here going to be single or will they all have wives and toddlers?”

Her friends laughed.

“Come outside with us,” Christine said.

“But I don’t want Jonathan to see me!”

“He won’t. We’ll stay away from the church. Being in here is depressing.”

“Fine,” she said, turning to Mary Alice. “Tag along?”

“No, I should go find Sam and make sure he’s not a mess of wrinkles.”

“Suit yourself!”

Outside, the sun hit Mary Alice like a whip. She put her hand to her face to shield her eyes and scanned the gravel parking lot for Samuel’s old pickup truck. Toward the front of the lot, she saw it and smiled. Samuel was checking his face in the mirror on his visor, pulling down the skin under his eyes and examining his nose for stray hairs. When Mary Alice knocked on the driver’s-side window, he nearly flew out of his seat, but the buckled belt kept him in place.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, opening the door a crack.

“It’s me.”

“And what time is it?”

Mary Alice looked at her watch. “Twelve-forty-seven.”

A wry smile washed across Samuel’s face. “Are you impressed?”

“More shocked, I guess.”

“Come on, give me some credit.”

“Fine.” She pecked him on the cheek. “Brian’s here, by the way. Made quite a first impression on Katherine.”

“Oh no, what’d he wear? I told him to keep it toned down.”

“A black suit. Pink everything else.”

“Oh, that’s practically priestlike for Brian. Did they get along?”

“Seemed to. I’m sure she’ll forget everything about him once the photos come back.”

“Hey,” Samuel said, ominously. “You doing OK?”

“Of course.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Good. By the way, you look very pretty today,” he said.

It’s not that she didn’t believe him, but there was something about the way he said it that implied an ulterior motive. Samuel had lied to her so often in the past that she had no problem discerning precisely when he was telling the truth. She felt prettier than she had in years, thanks to Katherine’s thoughtfulness with the dress, but she could count on two hands the number of times Samuel had ever complimented her looks. He was hiding something, but now wasn’t the time to think about it, so she returned his compliment with a smile as complex as love itself, a twisty, earnest expression of anxious attachment. “Go inside and keep my dad company. I know they haven’t put out the booze, but I wouldn’t put it past him to find some anyway. So please make sure he’s not drinking yet. If he asks you to get him a beer, just say yes but never bring one. Do that enough times and he’ll forget. Just make sure he doesn’t run off looking himself. Katherine doesn’t need him getting in anyone’s way.” He gave her upper arm a rub, and kissed her on the forehead.

Mary Alice and Katherine’s father, Edward, a round bald man with a permanent smile that could be read one of two ways depending on the context, was red-faced even before a day of champagne and light beer, and by the time he gave his speech later that evening, he was a cherry in black tie. “Well, that went off without a hitch, apart from the hitch,” he said with a smirk in the hall. The room erupted in laughter. Even those who’d heard him make the same joke in conversation earlier that day couldn’t help but give in to the old man’s charms. “Katherine, you’re the prettiest dang bride I’ve seen since nineteen and fifty-two, when your momma was settin’ right where you are now. I know she’s looking down smiling. Mainly because she doesn’t have to deal with me.” More laughs; he was doing his job perfectly. “But seriously, darlin’. I’m so proud of you, I’m so happy for you, and I love you more’n I love anything on this planet. And, Jonathan? Take care of her, OK? You may not carry a gun but I got plenty.” Edward fumbled with the microphone stand, and after failing to pop it back into its socket, simply gave up and set it on the floor. He stepped to the bride to give her a big hug, which was met with more applause and warm smiles, even from Samuel, oblivious to his wife’s empty stare. She shook her head subtly, dabbed at the tears welling up in both eyes, and whispered, “I’m going to head to the ladies’ room.”

Inside the bathroom, she stared at herself in the mirror and replayed her father’s drunken speech. Everything had been so lovely before that, hadn’t it? The ceremony was long but ultimately incident-free, everyone looked absolutely stunning—even the girls in their terrible dresses—but Mary Alice had long believed that no wedding was meant to go off without a hitch, to quote her father. And though no one else would have agreed—oh, how they laughed and cried right along with him—she decided her father’s speech was the hitch in question. Was it wedding day puffery, calling Katherine the person he loved more than anything, or was it the truth? Had he said anything similar at her own wedding? She leaned closer into the faded, scuffed mirror and searched for the memory of her wedding but couldn’t remember anything aside from dry chicken breasts and her mother’s ill-fitting wedding dress, neither of which had been her choice. When Maria came into the bathroom with her young daughter, she waved hello and stepped outside for a few more moments alone.

It was nearly 8:00 p.m., the sun was down, and a breeze had lowered the temperature at least ten degrees. She rubbed her arms and looked out at the baseball field on the other side of the parking lot, remembering the summer evenings she spent reading under the bleachers instead of watching the games, letting her bright blue snow cone drip over the pages of whatever paperback she had slipped out of her mother’s shelf. Her whole life wasn’t just in this town, it was in a radius of about one hundred yards. Everyone she knew and loved within earshot. She’d nodded in the past when her sister called Billington “suffocating” and claimed that she felt “trapped,” but standing there and feeling so close to her entire life didn’t feel like a punishment to Mary Alice. It simply felt small. No, she decided then, it felt close. Never enough distance to forget. Always remembering, never looking ahead.

The door behind her sprung open and slammed the wall behind it. A smash followed by a sly giggle. She turned around and found Christine, her hair flattened by the events of the day, waving, then covering her mouth as she laughed. She bolted off to her right and disappeared behind the old schoolhouse, a three-story redbrick building abandoned since before she could remember. She’d only been inside a few times, pressured by classmates as a tween to sneak in and slide down the rusty fire-escape slide, which was finally removed after Tommy Lutz broke his leg a few years prior.

Mary Alice turned her gaze back to the baseball field, believing Christine just needed a private place to vomit up the two bottles of sparkling wine she’d had since noon. Something about the evening, her father’s speech, her husband’s reliability, and now this stranger’s drunken glee brought the tears back to her eyes. Afraid of running into anyone else, she walked quickly to her car. The doors were unlocked, as she expected, and she sat in the driver’s seat, facing the visiting team’s dugout. She folded down the visor and checked her face in the mirror. Damn, she thought. Her eyes were still bloodshot. She took a few deep breaths to calm herself before stepping back out, then noticed the hall door open in the mirror. Jonathan had stepped out, and he hadn’t been as forceful as Christine. He let the door shut gently behind him and looked left and right before running toward the old schoolhouse.

Mary Alice instinctively slammed the visor shut and shook her head to calm the storm building inside her head. She waited a few moments to make sure she wouldn’t be seen, then stepped out of the car and walked back to the hall.

At the table, Samuel asked what took her so long, if she was OK. “Bring me another beer,” she said.

It was possible she saw nothing. Or, rather, that she just saw two people leave a building and head in the same direction toward a relatively isolated building some two minutes apart. There was no reason to speculate about Jonathan, especially now, on his wedding day, and therefore no reason for her to drink her beer as quickly as she did. But she did all of those things, and Samuel noticed.

“You all right?”

“I’m totally fine,” Mary Alice said, too defensively.

“You just seem a little high-strung.”

Mary Alice set the empty bottle down on the table and began tapping the neck with her wedding ring. “It’s just a big day, that’s all,” she said. “My little sister just got married, and she’s about to leave me forever.”

Samuel sank a little into his chair. “It’s not forever, and she’s not going far away.”

Mary Alice nodded, not out of agreement but to end their conversation. While considering ways to change the subject, she overheard her sister whispering to one of her bridesmaids a few seats away.

“Johnny’s been in the bathroom for, like, half an hour.”

“He probably went outside to sneak a cigarette,” Mandy said. “That’s where Marty and Roy and Scott went.”

“Ew! No! I made him quit months ago,” Katherine shrieked.

“Let him enjoy himself for one day.”

Catching her listening, Katherine turned to Mary Alice. “You wouldn’t let Samuel start smoking again, would you?”

“I never smoked to begin with,” he said, poking his head out toward the center of the table to meet her gaze.

“That’s true,” Mary Alice said, her hand now tapping the beer bottle at a faster rate. “But if you wanted to smoke outside with Marty and Roy and Scott,” she said, clearing her throat, “and Jonathan, I would turn a blind eye because it’s a special occasion.”

“See?” Mandy exclaimed. “Let him have fun.”

“I’m not fun enough for him?”

Mary Alice rolled her eyes, but immediately felt guilty for it. “Katherine, this is not the day for worry. This is a good day, remember?” Alcohol always coaxed the teenage brat out of her sister, and Mary Alice was irrationally more annoyed by this childish behavior than what she saw—or thought she saw—outside the hall.

But now wasn’t the time for scolding, so she pushed back her frustrations and rubbed her sister’s back. “It’s going to be OK,” she said. “It’s going to be OK.” The loving moment must have appeared sweet to Brian, who at that moment flitted by and snapped a photo of them from across the table. The shutter made Katherine’s head pop up like a cat’s ears.

“Stop it,” she said to him, a vicious snap that made the rest of the table shut up. “I mean it.”

“Oh. Apologies, dear,” he said. “I thought I’d caught a nice little moment.”

“Well, you didn’t, so prance away to someone else.”

“Katherine,” Mary Alice said gravely. “He’s just doing his job.”

“He’s supposed to capture happiness, not this.”

“You’re overreacting! He just went outside for a cigarette!”

Brian shot a wide-eyed look at Samuel, who waved him away as subtly as he could.

The whole thing was on the precipice of utter chaos. Katherine was a powder keg veiled in white flint, looking for any reason to explode. Everyone at the table seemed to know it, Mary Alice most acutely. So when Jonathan burst in just a few moments later, when Katherine’s outburst seemed all but inevitable, the guests breathed a collective sigh of relief.

“Where have you been, you little sneak?” she said, jumping into his arms. “I’ve been asking for my husband.” The way she said husssssband in a snakelike falsetto made Mary Alice wince. Jonathan gave her the confident, nothing-could-ever-go-wrong smile she’d fallen in love with. It was the practiced expression of homecoming kings and investment bankers and presidents, a disarmingly soothing curl of the mouth that feels strong and protective because we have been conditioned to assume it must be. The alternative would mean everything we’ve ever been taught is a lie. Mary Alice, used to being undesired by and incapable of desiring all the men in her class growing up, learned to see right through it early in life, but poor Katherine had never been given that lesson. She’d always been wanted, which tends to prove dangerous for someone who does so much wanting.

Suddenly, all was well again. The party went on, the dancing continued, everyone drank more beer and ate more dry chocolate cake. When only family and a handful of friends remained, a droopy-eyed Katherine stumbled into the ladies’ room while Mary Alice was washing her hands. Katherine reached around her sister as her hands were still under the tap and squeezed hard, nearly falling asleep in the nook below her arms. She’d stopped drinking hours ago, but the lingering buzz made the moment feel weightless and perfect. Not since grade school had they spent a full day together without actual incident, and Mary Alice believed for the shortest of moments that this was a sign of their lives to come; that their relationship had finally evolved into the kind of sisterhood she’d only read about or seen in the movies. There was tension, sure—and maybe there always would be—but the love was more palpable than ever.

“John didn’t smell like smoke,” Katherine said, her voice muffled by Mary Alice’s dress.

“What?”

She picked up her head and looked up at her sister. “He told me he had been gone for so long because he was smoking, but when he came back he didn’t smell like smoke. What do you think that means?”

“I think it means you’re thinking too much.”

“No,” Katherine said, pushing herself out of Mary Alice’s tightening grip. “I think you think it means something. And I think you don’t want to tell me.”

“Katherine, I don’t. You’re being paranoid because you just got married. Everything is fine.” To Mary Alice, the lie felt as if it were manifesting into something visible, something she could barely keep concealed.

“I think you think he did something stupid.”

A pain appeared in Mary Alice’s chest. There’s no way Katherine could have seen anything beyond Christine and Jonathan leaving a few minutes apart, but she put the pieces together anyway. Had the two of them behaved strangely earlier in the day? Had she been suspicious of his wandering eye before? Mary Alice imagined the torture her sister must have been feeling, but knew she could never explain what she had seen, at least not now, plenty drunk on her wedding day. So she offered a tender smile and stroked her hair.

“What you need is to find your husband, go back to the hotel, and sleep off this day. It’s been a blur, I bet. Exhausting. OK? I’ve been through it. Weddings, they’re hard work for the people getting married.”

“Tell me.”

“There isn’t anything to tell you, Kat.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t call me that,” Katherine said, shaking her head and pacing around the tiny, dull bathroom. “I’m not a child anymore. I don’t want my marriage to begin like yours did.”

The forced smile on Mary Alice’s face dropped. “What do you mean, like mine did?”

“With secrets.” Katherine wiped her eyes and checked herself in the mirror. “I don’t want any of those. I don’t want your life. I don’t want your husband.”

Mary Alice was baffled. Her brow furrowed, and her head began shaking. Every part of her was soon vibrating. “There are no secrets between me and Samuel.”

“Aren’t there?” She was suddenly speaking with a cool lucidity, as if something about the act of confrontation had sobered her up.

“Katherine, I love you, and it was a beautiful day,” Mary Alice said, walking to the door. “But I have to go before this beautiful day turns into something I don’t want to remember.” She grabbed the doorknob and twisted, but part of her subconscious was daring her sister to stoke the fire.

“At least I’m sure about one thing,” Katherine said. Mary Alice kept her hand on the knob and her eyes on the floor.

“What’s that?”

“That I didn’t marry a faggot.” The words hissed out of her so easily, like a violent exhalation.

“I’m leaving. Congratulations, Katherine.”

“If you aren’t telling me something, I’ll never forgive you.”

Mary Alice turned around in a sharp movement and tapped her left foot down when she faced her sister. “I saw your husband, Jonathan, leave the hall with your friend Christine and head to the old schoolhouse together. And as far as I know, there weren’t any classes today.” For a second Mary Alice thought she hadn’t actually said anything, because Katherine gave no reaction. She stepped closer and kept talking, her voice lilting into the patronizing tone of a bad teacher embarrassing a student in front of the entire class. “That’s what you thought happened, isn’t it? You must have expected it, or you wouldn’t have asked. You must have seen the way they acted. Come to think of it, I bet you even watched them leave. They weren’t exactly subtle, were they? And now you have confirmation that you weren’t just imagining things. Now you know the truth. So you’re welcome. Congratulations. Now you get to get the hell out of this town and spend the rest of your life with a man you can’t trust. I may not have struck gold, but at least I didn’t marry a liar.”

“You love this, don’t you,” Katherine said. “You think it’s exactly what you always wanted. You think you’re watching me suffer from the high road. Well, guess what, I’m not as miserable as you think I am. So when you lie down at night next to a husband who sleeps as far away from you as he can without falling off the bed and think, ‘At least I’m not Katherine. At least I’m being honest with myself,’ just know you’ll be wrong. Never forget that you had a choice to let Samuel come back to Billington alone after you two graduated. You had a choice to leave, to finally move somewhere else. But you chose otherwise.” Katherine smirked, the sort of drunken grin that makes a person look absolutely vicious. “And you hate that I didn’t.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Katherine,” Mary Alice said, matching Katherine’s grin almost exactly. “I don’t hate your choices. I just hate you.”

Mary Alice wanted to take it back instantly. Instead, she took a deep breath and marched slowly and silently through the door, never looking back.