The kettle ticked. Outside, a neighbor who had not been invited to the wedding mowed a last strip of grass, the sound rising and falling like an animal that did not know history was happening next door. Emma watched the phone as if it might speak on its own. It did not. Phones only speak when asked, and even then they speak in the voice of someone who can no longer revise.
While they waited, the past did what it always did in that house. It sat down without being offered a chair.
David had met Claire at a wedding that was not theirs, which struck him later as a lack of originality and also as a clue. He was twenty-six, an engineer at a firm that designed bridges he would never personally cross, and he had come to the reception because the groom had once pulled him out of a ditch in college with a laugh that made rescue feel like friendship. Claire was twenty-four and worked at the county library, and she was standing by the gift table rearranging cards that did not need rearranging because she hated being a guest without a job. Her hair was dark and cut at the shoulder. She had a laugh she tried to aim downward, into her chest, as if joy were a thing that might disturb other tables.
He said something foolish about the cheese. She said the cheese had not asked for his opinion. He stayed anyway. By the time someone gave a toast that went on too long, they had traded the names of the books they pretended to reread and the names of the towns they had not managed to leave. She told him she wanted a porch and a child and a life in which no one asked her to perform enthusiasm. He told her he wanted work that did not make him lie about deadlines. They danced once, badly, and then sat out the fast songs and watched other people sweat.
They married two years later in a smaller church than the one Emma would someday interrupt. Claire wore a dress the color of cream, not white, because white made her feel like a cake. Helen cried in a dignified register. David's father, still alive then, shook Claire's hand too long and said, "Don't let him disappear into a project," which was both advice and autobiography. The reception was in a garden. It rained for nine minutes. Claire kicked off her shoes and danced in the wet grass, and David, who feared colds and scenes equally, danced with her because the alternative was becoming a man who watched his own wife from a dry place.