Eleven: Bells!!

The Dance Hall had been made bigger for the evening and it had not been subtle about it. The blackwood floor ran twice as far as it had any business running. Gold filigree climbed walls that had not been standing that morning, and the dome overhead had settled on some deep blue dusk that matched nothing outside it. Down the western side the long windows showed the real sky, and the real sky had gone down early, as if the hour had been moved forward while nobody was watching.

The music had started somewhere above the floor without anybody asking it to, not loud enough yet to be listened to, but loud enough that the room had already begun matching itself to it. Alex, black wings extended as if in a welcome, was playing a rendition of the Wedding March that turned heads, and set the blood pumping. The first people through the doors would spend a minute looking for where it came from and then cheer. Some would clap.

Andy took his place where the doors opened onto the path. He had been told where to stand twice, once by Arabella and once by Mildred, and he had lost both sets of instructions somewhere on the walk over, so he picked the spot that put the garden at his back and the room in front of him and decided it counted. The mantle fell about him regally.

The others came in around him without anybody arranging it. Myra took his left shoulder and stayed there. Emily and Dawn had the other side, Erin a pace behind them holding somebody’s abandoned glass that she had not been given and did not want. Claire put herself where she could watch the path, which meant she would know who was coming before he did. Emi had six hands free and was using none of them. Laura set her three bodies in a shallow arc at his back, one at either end and one behind him, and the arc corrected itself every time he shifted his weight, without any of her appearing to look.

Then the path filled up, and the first of them came through.

Emi's mother did not wait to be received. She had her shoes in one hand from the crossing, and she got the other arm around Andy’s own before he could offer one, which left him holding on to a woman who was holding on to him with a pair of good flats folded into the grip. She squeezed once, and then once more, as if the second one were checking the first.

“It is real now,” she announced. “Everybody was talking. Talking, talking. Now nobody has to talk.”

Emi's father came up a step behind her with his glasses already stowed in his breast pocket. He waited for his wife to finish with Andy’s hands and then took one of them himself.

“You did not seem frightened,” Julien said. “I watched for it the whole way across the water.”

Andy got his own hands back. “I was. You just couldn’t see it from the bank. She’s two down on my right, and she’s been asking after you both since the bridge.”

Kim Hana let go of him to get at her daughter, and the crowd took the two of them sideways into the room, and Emi bent down to be reached the way she had been bending down to be reached all day. Andy realized with a start that Emi was taller now than she had been when they had last seen her parents in Paris. Six arms made a particular shape around a small woman with her shoes still in her hand. Nobody on the path looked twice at it.

Kathleen Allen came through next and folded him into a hug before he had his hands out of the last one.

“Well.” Kathleen held him out at arm’s length and had a proper look at him, hem to circlet. “Forty minutes married. Does it suit you?”

“Ask me at dinner.”

“I will.” Kathleen said it the way she said things to David, dry all the way through with the affection underneath doing the actual work. Then the dryness went out of it. She still had hold of his upper arms. “David and I raised one daughter, Andy Cooper. Exactly one, between the two of us, and we just handed you the whole of her, out there, in front of everybody.”

He had a joke ready. He put it down. “I know,” Andy said.

Kathleen’s grip on his upper arms tightened by a measurable amount. “I’m going to be watching what you do with that.”

“You should,” he said. “I’d think less of you if you weren’t.”

Emily had gone still for all of it, a pace behind him, and stayed still, and said nothing. Her mother had known she would hear every word of it, and had said it where she would.

David was behind her. He put his hand out. Andy took it, and David gave him the nod: one, slow, held a beat past the length of a nod, aimed at him and not at Kathleen, the same one he had given on the bridge and never explained either.

Then David put his free hand over the top of the handshake. “You’re family. On paper and off it. There’s nothing left over.”

“Thank you,” Andy said, low. “Thank you for welcoming me.”

David looked at him for a second longer. Whatever he did with that, he did it somewhere behind his face, and then he took Kathleen’s elbow and steered her at the room, and Emily reached out of the line and caught her mother’s wrist as she went past, and Kathleen said something to her that Andy didn’t get and didn’t need.

Andy was still trying to figure out how to read David’s nod when Alejandro Moreno came up the path with a son on either side of him, a formation Andy instinctively recognized. Luis got there first. He shook Andy’s hand the way he had that first night, one long pressure that stopped short of being a test this time — the kind of grip that asks a question the first time and issues a receipt every time after — and let go. “Congratulations.” Then, flat: “You could have done that without the paperwork. We already told you yes.”

“Your approval came with a cross-examination in a doorway,” Andy said. “I wanted a copy I could frame.”

Luis came close to smiling, which on him counted as a parade. “You can have both, I suppose. One is worth more.”

Sebastian came around his brother’s shoulder with his hands in his pockets and his chin up, seventeen and pretending to be bored at a wedding with a goddess in it. “Serious question,” Sebastian said. “Do grooms get a drink before the toasts, or do you wait like everybody else?”

“You wait like everybody else,” Andy said. “Sorry to disappoint.”

Sebastian took that without any visible disappointment. “That’s what Luis said.”

“Luis is right,” Andy said.

“Luis is always right,” Sebastian groaned, with enormous weariness, and went to find the tables.

Their father had stopped short of Andy. He had not come through the line at all. He had gone left, four steps, and stopped in front of his daughter with his hat already off, and he was standing there in front of Dawn with both her hands taken up in both of his, and he was not saying anything yet.

Andy had seen the same stillness that morning on the mound, from the far side of the water, when Liesa had said out loud to the whole garden what Dawn had been to that family after their mother died. He had never got to answer it. There had been no room in the ceremony for an answer, and Andy had wondered at the time whether one was coming at all.

Alejandro’s thumbs moved once across the backs of his daughter’s hands. “You raised my sons. Better than I ever managed to father them. That’s what I have.”

Dawn’s ears went flat against her hair and stayed flat.

“Dad,” Dawn said, eyes wet. “Dad, no. I know what it was like for you. I was there. You lost Mom—”

“I lost myself.” He didn’t raise his voice, but he raised his hand between them, one finger up, the way he used to when she was small and he meant listen. “You know what happened to me, yes. You watched it. And I took you for granted through all of it, mija, because you were the daughter and I was supposed to be the father, and instead I was a man in a chair by a window who couldn’t remember what day it was. You cooked for your brothers. You kept that house going. You were a child.”

“I wanted to—”

“I know you wanted to.” His thumbs stopped moving and settled on her knuckles like they meant to stay there. “That’s where I failed, mija. Not the grief. The grief anybody gets. The failure is that my fifteen-year-old daughter had to step in, and I let her, because it was easier than getting out of the chair.”

Dawn made a small sound in her nose, half laugh, half something else entirely, and pulled her hands free of his so she could put her arms around him instead.

“Stubborn,” she said into his shoulder. “You were always so stubborn.”

“It's a family curse.” He hugged her back with both arms, broad hands spread over her shoulder blades, and his voice came out lower than it had been a moment ago, rougher at the edges. “That’s why I’m saying it now. While I can still be stubborn about it.”

She laughed again, wetly, and he laughed too, once, and then neither of them laughed anymore, and they stood in the doorway of the reception holding each other while Dawn’s tail went quiet against the back of her dress and her father cried into her hair without a sound.

It was all of it, and it was enough for both of them. Luis had found something on the far side of the doors to look at. Alejandro said one more thing to her, too low to carry, two words, maybe three, and then let go of her hands and came back to the line and shook Andy’s hand without any of it showing on him at all.

Out on the path, the next family had come around the hedge, and they had come around it together.

Augustin and Fiona Delgado came up the path side by side, at the same speed, with about two feet of air between them, and neither of them said anything about it. Andy had last interacted with them years ago, Augustin arguing about the route from the parking field before either of them had finished saying hello to their daughter. Now there was a distance the two of them had agreed on somewhere, and both of them were keeping to it.

They both stopped in front of him and both took a second longer than the line wanted. The last time either of them had looked at him with any attention, he had been Erin’s boyfriend of two years and nothing else anybody had to think about, and now he was standing in a doorway in a mantle with a gold circlet on his head, and their daughter was standing two feet behind him with a wedding ring on and nothing else but her shoes—green, and entirely unremarked on, by either of them or by anybody else on that path.

“Seven,” Fiona said at last, in the kind of voice that has already written your answer down and is only checking it against the sheet. “And others besides, Erin tells me. You must keep a very large calendar.”

“It’s a big calendar,” Andy offered.

“I’m sure it is.” Fiona looked past him at the room, and her hands found a stack of cocktail napkins on the nearest high table and squared them, although they were already square, as if she had been waiting since the parking field for something to be out of line. “Well. You look well.”

Augustin had not said anything. He had the hand up, the one that went to his mouth when he was about to speak and then didn’t.

“Erin’s careful about people,” Augustin said. “Always has been. She doesn’t let them in and she doesn’t say why.” He took his hand down. “You got past it. So you must have done something right, somewhere in there.”

“She let me in,” Andy said. “I just didn’t leave.”

Augustin nodded once. He had nothing else. It had cost him something to get out, and he moved off toward the tables as fast as the crowd would let him, the way a man leaves a room he has just told the truth in. Fiona watched him go and then, without any visible seam at all, said something warm and complimentary about the flowers and followed him.

Steve came around them both with his hand already out. He had got tall. He was his father’s frame with none of the weight on it yet, wrists showing past his cuffs, hair cut at home by somebody in a hurry, and he came in with his hand already out as if he had practiced the motion in the car.

“Mr. Cooper,” Steve blurted, and then laughed at himself for it. “Sorry. That’s… sorry. Andy, right? Last time you were in our house I was fifteen.”

“You were,” Andy said, smiling. “You’re about a foot and a half taller now.”

“Yeah.” Steve rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, that’s about… yeah. It happens.” He got his hand back into his pocket and stopped fidgeting with it, which took visible effort. “Anyway. I’m glad it’s finally happening. Somebody in this family ought to get a good day.” He grinned. “Take care of my sister, will you? Whatever you are doing, it’s working—I’ve never seen Erin so relaxed, so happy. Keep doing it.”

He went after his mother. Erin caught him by the sleeve as he passed her and said something into the side of his head, and Steve went red from the collar up and laughed like he was seven. Augustin had stopped at the edge of the floor with his back to all of it and his hands behind him, watching the long windows, where the light had gone another degree down while nobody was counting.

The path emptied out for a moment after that, as a line does when a family that came in a single car has all gone through at once. Andy used the gap. He moved his shoulders under the mantle and found out that they were sore, and moved the circlet back off the place it had been sitting on since the water, and got about nine seconds of being nobody in a doorway.

One of Laura’s bodies took the circlet out of his hands, straightened it, and put it back where it went, and all three of her were watching the path again before he could thank her. Behind him the room had begun to fill in properly: the near tables taken, a knot around the drinks, Dawn gone in off the line somewhere behind him and already three conversations deep with people she was treating like regulars.

Then Annabelle Freeman came up the path alone with her coat folded over one arm. She was small the way Claire was small, and she had Claire’s eyes—set in a face that had spent thirty years arranging itself for other people’s benefit— and she stopped in front of Andy instead of going on down the line to her daughter.

“You haven’t eaten,” Annabelle said. “Have you eaten? You haven’t. I watched you not eat since the water. Were the rooms all right for everyone? They were all right, I saw the little signs, somebody thought about the signs. I don’t want to make a thing of it. But you should eat something.”

“There’s a plate with my name on it about nine feet that way,” Andy said. “Dawn’s been guarding it.”

“Good. Good.” Annabelle turned the ring on her right hand. The heavier of the two, worn beside her own since Claire’s father died. “Thank you for reading it.”

“She wrote it.”

“I know she wrote it. I’m thanking you for the other part.” Annabelle’s chin came up and stayed up. “A whole garden heard my daughter’s own words, in her own order. Nobody summarized her. Do you know how long it has been since a room heard her at full length?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. I stopped keeping track of it.” Annabelle stopped there, and let it stand, and did not soften it afterward. “I spent thirty years getting out in front of her. Teachers. Doctors. A woman at a bank once. I made the calls, I did the rehearsals in the car, I was good at it, and I was never sorry about a minute of it. None of that was the part I was afraid of.”

Andy waited. Somewhere behind him Erin was laughing at something, and a chair went over and got picked up again, and the room went on with itself.

“I was afraid she would end up loved by somebody who would be very kind about her,” Annabelle said. “That she would get somebody patient. And that she would have to be less than she is for the rest of her life so that the kindness could keep going.”

Down the line, four people away, Claire’s tail stopped moving. She hadn’t heard it. She was looking at the path with her notebook shut against her chest, and she had no way of hearing it from there, and she stopped anyway, because whatever was happening in him had gone across to her the way it always did.

“I don’t want her any different,” Andy said. “Not quieter, not easier, not more like anybody. She’s the most exact person I have ever met and I love every part of her exactly as it already is. If you need somebody to say that out loud, I’ll say it as often as you want it said.”

Annabelle stood there and did not do anything with her hands at all, which for her was the loudest thing available.

“Well,” Annabelle breathed. “Well. All right.” And then, because she had got to the end of something and had to get back off it: “I nearly went down, you know. During. There was a chair, and I had decided the chair and I were going to have to come to an arrangement.”

“You didn’t take it,” Andy said.

“I did not take it. I walked back to my seat like a person.” Annabelle lifted her chin at him again, and there was a whole face underneath the managing one, and Andy got about two seconds of it. “You’ll have your hands full.”

“I know,” Andy said, with a smile. “But it’ll be the good kind of having them full. Thank you for her.”

She went on down the line to her daughter. Claire put both arms around her and her mother went into it and disappeared, small woman into small woman, the coat hanging off one of them and trailing on the floor. Myra shifted her weight at Andy’s left shoulder and said nothing whatsoever about what she was picking up off the pair of them, which was its own kind of information.

Out on the path the line had backed up while he wasn’t watching. It went down the garden and around the hedge and kept going past where he could see, and every one of them was going to come through this door and take his hand, and some of them he had never met, and one of them had driven five days out of a hospital corridor to be here.

Andy rolled his shoulders under the mantle again and put his hand out for the next one.

---

It was Jonathan Ramsey who arrived with luggage.

He had a garment bag folded over one arm, carried the way you carry a thing you have not yet been told where to put, and he shook Andy’s hand with the other one, introducing himself, and did not put the bag down to do it. Behind him the line had thickened again while Andy wasn’t watching it, and the noise in the room had come up to the point where the music had given up competing and started agreeing instead. There had been eleven or twelve people between Annabelle and this one: faces from the garden that morning, a man he had shaken hands with twice already and would shake hands with again, two women who had come a very long way and wanted him to know the name of their town. He had them all. He would not have all of them by midnight.

“Well,” Jonathan said. “What time does this wind down, roughly? I don’t need it exact.”

“It doesn’t matter what time,” Andy said, softly. Jonathan waited, politely, for the useful version. Andy took the garment bag off him and handed it sideways to a Mildred who had arrived for exactly that purpose. “Mildred’s driving you home. Whenever you’re ready to go. There’s no clock on it and there’s nothing for you to arrange.”

Something came out of Jonathan’s shoulders that had been in them since the lobby. He watched the garment bag go as though it had become a different object.

“Well,” Jonathan said. “All right, then.”

“Oh, thank God,” A girl who looked a little like a younger Chloe announced, arriving at speed. Her voice got into the room about a second ahead of the rest of her. “Paige, Paige Ramsey. He has been doing the math out loud since breakfast. Five hours forty each way, and a whole separate number for gas, and he made us listen to all of it twice.”

“Five forty’s not bad,” Andy said.

Paige scoffed. “Five forty is a war crime. He’s the slowest driver I’ve ever met. And he loves gas stations. Once I watched that man eat a gas station sandwich standing up in the sun and tell me he was fine.”

“Was he fine?”

“He was radiant,” Paige said. “That’s what’s wrong with him.”

Jonathan’s wife Lorraine came through a step behind her daughter with her hair coming down out of its knot, and she looked at Andy for a second and a half longer than the greeting called for. Then it was gone, before Paige had finished her sentence, and Lorraine put both hands up and redid the knot.

Chloe threaded in between her mother and her sister and took Andy’s hand out of the air without any ceremony whatsoever.

Nobody looked at it. Jonathan went on considering the garment bag. Paige kept talking. Lorraine reached past the pair of them to straighten the collar of Andy’s mantle, found it beyond her jurisdiction, and gave up on it cheerfully.

“Dad,” Chloe said, “you don't have to drive. Mildred will take you home.”

“That is a fair point,” Jonathan said.

Paige rounded on her. “It is a fair point, it is my point, I made it when we arrived—”

“You made it at the volume of a leaf blower,” Chloe said, and then, to Andy, without any change of gear at all, “You haven’t eaten.”

“I’ve been—”

“Can I—” Chloe had already turned and taken a tray off a passing Mildred, and she put three things on a napkin and put the napkin in his hand and closed his fingers around it, and was back in her family before he could say thank you. Her mother said something to her about her shoes. Her father asked her whether the stay had been all right for her specifically.

“It was fine, Dad.” Chloe moved her mother’s hand off her collar without looking at it. “I’ve had a great time so far.”

“Well. Good.” Jonathan looked at Andy over the top of his daughter’s head. “There’s a door at the end of that corridor that isn’t sitting in its frame.”

“I’ll tell somebody,” Andy said.

“I can handle it,” Jonathan said, and went to go and do it.

They went on into the room in a loose knot, Paige walking backward for the first six feet of it to finish something, Lorraine already redoing the knot of her hair again, and Chloe in the middle of them being handed things to carry that she had not offered to carry. Andy watched them go, and for about four seconds he had nothing in his hands but a napkin and nothing in his head but the arithmetic.

Nergal was out there somewhere between this handshake and the last toast of the night. Not a rumor and not a possibility: a thing Laura had felt on the sky that afternoon and said to him in front of the water.

He moved the napkin to his other hand. Arabella had it covered. Every family in this building lifted out of it the moment he got close, every one of them waking up tomorrow with a wedding in their heads and nothing else in there at all. Andy believed the whole of it. What nobody could tell him, Arabella included, was whether it happened in twenty minutes with Paige Ramsey still mid-sentence about a sandwich, or at two in the morning after the last of them had already gone home on their own feet.

Somewhere a long way outside the building, under the music and the noise, something turned over. It was not loud. The glass in the long windows took it and let it go again, as if somebody had shut a heavy door two gardens away, and half the room went on not hearing it at all.

Jonathan came back past the doors with the screen door dealt with and stopped to listen for it. “Hm,” he remarked, to nobody in particular. “There’s weather in that.”

Andy ate one of the things off the napkin.

The man who could only be Norah’s father came up the path next, and stopped one pace short of the doorway, and put his hand flat against his chest for a moment before he offered it, as if he were introducing himself to the room and not to the man in the doorway. He was a compact, broad-chested man in a pressed shirt and a jacket he had worn to something once a year for thirty years, and he was standing up straighter than he needed to be standing.

Norah got to them out of the crowd before anybody could start. “Baba.” Norah put a hand flat on her father’s sleeve. “Mama. This is Andy.” A hand turned over, once, each way. “Andy—my father, Ghassan. My mother, Widad.”

Ghassan took Andy’s hand. He held it slightly longer than a handshake needs, and Andy could see him building the sentence before any of it arrived. Ghassan let go of his hand. “What is it that you do? And do you intend to provide for her properly?”

“I’m between jobs at the moment,” Andy said. “I sold my last company about three months ago. The money’s enough that nobody here has to worry about it—but Norah makes significant money, and I suspect she’d like you to know she doesn’t need taking care of.”

“I would,” Norah said.

Ghassan looked at that for a moment the way a man looks at a column of figures he had not expected to balance. Something in his face let go about a quarter of an inch, and stayed let go.

“Good,” Ghassan said.

Widad had already gone past them both. She got two steps into the room, turned in the doorway with the whole reception behind her, and asked the only question she was going to ask all night. “Where will you live?”

“We don’t know yet. Somewhere outside of New York City, perhaps,” Andy said.

Widad Rahman laughed — one hard, delighted crack of it, entirely unlike anything her daughter had ever got out of her in a doorway — and she reached up and adjusted the collar of Andy’s mantle, then went in.

Her daughters came through behind her in a block, and Norah named them off as they came, oldest first: Nadia, Reem, Hana. Nadia had the room assessed before she had finished shaking Andy’s hand. She was the tallest of the four and the only one who had her father’s stillness in her, and on her it read as somebody about four minutes from having to leave.

“You’ve got a problem with the seating,” Nadia said. “You’ve got a hundred people and you’ve put the long tables against the windows, so everybody on the far side has to go the whole length of the room to get anywhere. You want them in threes, down the middle, and you want the gaps staggered. Okay? It’s not a difficult fix, it’s just one you have to make before people put their bags down. Okay?”

Norah did not raise her voice for it. “Nadia.”

Nadia was not finished. “Because once they put their bags down—”

“Enough,” Norah said.

Nadia subsided. She looked wounded for about as long as it takes to find something else to have an opinion about, and then she found one, over by the far wall, and went to go and have it. Two of her sisters watched her go with the identical expression, and neither of them commented, and Andy understood that this was a thing that happened in that family at a fixed rate, like a tide.

Reem did not bother with any of that.

“So,” Reem began, grinning, already enjoying it, “when are you marrying my little sister? Or, if that’s a lot of paperwork, when are the two of you giving those people over there a grandchild? Because they have four daughters and six grandchildren and they will take a seventh off anybody at this point. They’re not fussy.”

Andy had an answer ready for it, but Norah got there first. She did not laugh. “I don’t want that.”

Reem waited for the rest of it, which was the laugh. It did not come. Behind her, over by the gift table, one of her nieces was being carried past horizontally by somebody, and Nadia had found the seating problem again and was explaining it to Mildred, and none of that reached this corner of the doorway at all.

“Not the wedding kind,” Norah said. “The standing up there in front of everyone, the dress, the whole day of it. I don’t want it. I never did.” She was not raising her voice. “I have what I wanted. I know exactly where I stand and I know exactly who I’m standing with, and nobody signed anything for me to know it, and nobody put a ring on me to make it true. You can have a ring and be nowhere. I’ve watched it.”

She did not look at Reem when she said the last part. She did not have to. Andy noticed she hadn’t mentioned the grandchild issue, but wisely did not bring it up. Reem’s grin caught on something. It was there and then it was doing a different job, holding its own shape while she got the rest of her face back, and for about two seconds the funniest woman in that family had nothing at all. “Okay. Okay. Fair.”

Hana had been standing a half step back through the whole of it with her hands folded in front of her.

“I’m so happy for you,” Hana said. “Really. I am so happy for you.”

She said it to Norah and she meant it, warm all the way through, and her smile stayed up for a beat after the sentence had finished with it — the kind of smile that has to be taken down afterward by hand — holding there on its own while she looked at her sister. Then she took Norah’s hand and pressed it and went in after Nadia.

The line kept coming. It had stopped being individual people some time ago and become a rate — a hand, a name, a town, a hand — and Andy had found the gear it ran in and was staying in it. Beside him the rest of them had found their own gears. Claire read the path ahead and passed each name back to him a beat before he needed it, and Dawn took anybody she recognized off his hands entirely.

A woman in a crimson dress caught both of Andy’s hands in hers before he had them free. He knew the face before he could place it, and then placed it: she was four along on the painted row of Hosts in the Museum, the one he had recited off a wall once without ever having met her. She had a great deal of ginger hair and a freckled face and a smile with a switch on it somewhere.

She got to him at a speed nobody else in that line had attempted. “Well, aren’t you a sight. Howdy, darlin’. I’m Vanessa. This has been an absolute hoot from start to finish, I mean that sincerely, I have taken notes.” She squeezed his hands, and then something went across her that had nothing to do with the room. “Natalia would love it here.”

“Who’s—”

She was already three people away and moving, waving over her shoulder with her whole arm, and the crowd closed behind her like water. Andy had no idea who Natalia was.

The next one was pink-haired and came through in somebody else’s face entirely, a look borrowed off a character Andy half recognized and could not place. It was not a disguise, but a face worn the way other people wear a coat, and she did not stop walking for any of it.

“Sally,” she announced, high-fiving his outstretched hand. “Gamer Edition. Great line. Tremendous line. Love a line. You know what this line needs? A second line. Also, I wasn’t asked to provide cake for this, but I’m happy to help with the next one.”

Andy let the hand he had out drop. He found himself smiling, despite himself, at the woman’s ebullience. “Thank you. I don’t handle the catering, though. I’d take it up with the Host.”

“Oh, that’s fine! I am a Host too,” Sally said, delighted, and was gone.

The next to approach was not a person at all. It was an emperor penguin, and it was wearing a butler’s tailcoat. The coat fit. It had been pressed. The penguin came down the receiving line the way a very small man carries a very large briefcase, one foot and then the other, rocking side to side with each step, unhurried and entirely certain of itself.

It stopped in front of Andy, drew itself up to its full height — which came to about his belt — and produced a cream-colored card from somewhere inside the coat with a neat flick of its wing.

“Lord Preminger,” it said, in a voice like somebody reading the shipping forecast. “On behalf of the great and magnificent Ora. She regrets she could not be present; hosting duties, you understand. She wished me to convey her felicitations.” It bowed, which involved tipping forward at the waist until its beak nearly touched the floor and then righting itself with a small wobble. “To you and all your brides. Every happiness.”

Dawn had stopped mid-conversation with Laura three feet away. Her mouth was open. Laura was leaning over Dawn’s shoulder to see, one hand clamped over her own mouth, making a sound that was either horror or laughter and probably both.

Andy took the card because there was nothing else to do with it. “Thank you,” he said. “Tell Ora we — appreciate it.”

“I shall.” The penguin gave him one more measured look, nodded once, and turned back down the line the way it had come, waddling with the same unhurried dignity past guests who were already reaching for their phones.

Dawn let out a long breath through her nose.

“That just happened,” Laura said.

The next two came through together and were nothing like each other. The first was very short, pink hair tied back with a green ribbon, a green suit and a white blouse pressed to within an inch of its life. She shook his hand exactly once. Andy had read her name off a list in a museum too, in a hall full of other people’s artifacts.

“Congratulations to you and to all seven of your wives,” Little Miss said. “It was a beautifully run event. I noticed the timings. Somebody worked hard on the timings. This is Jess.”

Beside her a blonde fox-woman in pink went up on her toes to see over the crowd, and her fox ears turned before the rest of her did. “Oh… yes… congratulations, it was lovely, the water part especially, my love, do you think Tracy would have gone to the—”

She stopped. Her ears went flat. Her hands came up in front of her mouth. “Whoopsiedoodles,” Jess whispered, to nobody at all.

“Thank you both,” Andy said, to the pair of them, as if he had heard none of it, which he had.

Jess went the color of her dress anyway.

It did not matter. They were already going, the short one steering, the blonde one talking the whole way and looking back twice. Before he could think about the interaction, a polished chrome sphere the size of a basketball, a single huge mechanical eye in the front and metallic hands floating near its surface without making contact, drifted soundlessly into the space they left, halting at Andy’s eye level.

“Congratulations!” it said, its voice surprisingly warm and conversational. “C2-30FG-Bravo-Helvetica. Really a pleasure to see such excellent harem optimization. If you’re ever interested in ditching Earth and giving a new planet a try, let me know. I know some great Eden-class planets that could use a human touch.”

Andy stared, his mind racing through a dozen possible responses and discarding each one as insufficient. Laura made a small choked sound beside him, halfway between a laugh and a gasp. Dawn, who had been mid-sip from her cup, slowly lowered it without drinking, her eyes wide.

“Thank you,” Andy managed at last, the words coming out half-strangled. “Right. New planet. Noted. I’ll... keep that in mind.”

The sphere hovered another moment as if processing his response, then pivoted smoothly and floated away toward the high dome as though it had simply remembered an appointment.

---

Skye had stopped in the middle of the floor. She had her cup lifted, high, both hands, up toward the place where the dome came down to meet the wall. Paige Ramsey, coming back past the doors with a drink in her hand and a line of complaint already loaded, followed the gesture up because her eyes were going that way anyway.

Nine feet of stunningly beautiful lilac-skinned woman sat on the gilded moulding with her back against the curve of the dome and her legs hanging down into the room, silver hair coming off the edge of the cornice and falling past her knees. She was naked. She was kicking her legs lazily, in the manner of somebody who has been asked once, nicely, and is trying.

Paige stopped. Everything about her stopped. Her mouth came open on the front end of a word and the word did not arrive, and she stood in the middle of a reception with her drink at an angle and made no sound at all for four full seconds, which was a personal record. Then Lorraine’s hand closed on her daughter’s arm from behind, without either of them looking, as if she had been doing it at intervals for twenty-five years and had stopped needing to check first. She pulled her back into the line.

---

The line moved. Myra had got as far as the end of the line and no further.

She stood a little past the doors with one hand resting on the back of a chair she did not need, letting the room come apart again. An hour ago, going over the water, the whole crowd had arrived in her at once and arrived as one thing: a single unbroken color with no edges anywhere in it, no separate people to hold apart, nothing to sort. She had never had that before. It had been like being carried.

It was over now. The hundred of them had gone back to being a hundred, and they were reassembling one at a time, a stranger’s nerves here, a stranger’s hunger there, the small greedy flare of somebody finding the drinks table, all of it laying itself down in layers across a room she was still learning the shape of.

Danielle arrived already mid-sentence and already crying, and laughing at the crying, which was the same thing she had done at graduations and in hospital parking lots and once at a commercial about a dog.

She had a box under one arm. She got the free hand around Myra’s and squeezed it, hard, twice. “Myr! I second-guessed this the entire drive. The entire drive. I got all the way to the driveway and I nearly asked the driver to turn around so I could buy something else, and then I thought, no, because if I buy something else I’ll just second-guess that too, and then I’ll be the woman who brings nothing.” She pushed the box at her and did not let go of it. “It’s not much. I want you to know I overthought it. I want that on the record.”

“Danielle—”

“Don’t open it here. Don’t open it at all, actually. Put it in a drawer and we’ll both feel better.” She got it into Myra’s hands to be rid of it.

Her adoptive sister’s hands came up to Myra’s shoulders then, and then to her face, both of them. It was not an embrace, but an inspection, and it was the same one she had run in the corridor outside the room with the blinds. Cheekbone, jaw, the corner of the eye, the same route in the same order, as if the thing that had gone wrong were something that could be found by going over it carefully enough.

In that corridor Myra had needed a hand under her elbow to cross eight feet of linoleum to a chair. Danielle had given her the hand and then apologized for it.

Danielle was in no way the same. Danielle was five days on from that and still standing in the corridor.

Myra put the box down on the chair she did not need and turned and went to get Andy. She got her hand into the crook of his arm and brought him back with her.

“Andy, this is my sister,” Myra said. “Danielle. Danielle, this is Andy.”

It stopped Danielle for half a beat. Her fingers had come out toward Myra’s arm on the way past, the first joint already curling, catching at somebody who was not falling and had not been going to. They hung there. Then they came down and did a small unnecessary thing to her own sleeve instead.

“Oh,” Danielle said. “Oh, you’re… hello. Hi. Sorry. Hello. You’re the… Of course you are. Of course you are. She never told me anything. Not one thing. I have had five days and about a hundred questions and she answers every single one of them in four words, she has done that since she was eleven, I assume you’ve noticed—”

Andy took her hand and said something warm and easy that Myra did not entirely hear, because the rest of it had arrived.

It came in whole. There was no taking it in pieces.

Her sister stood there in front of her burning steady — warm right through, no flicker anywhere in it, no thin place at the edges where a person’s love for you runs out and gets topped up with duty. Myra had been telling herself about that thin place since she was ten years old. She had built a considerable amount of her life on the far side of it. The closet they had split down the middle, the school photographs, fifteen years of birthday calls, and all of it had had a second reading available, a colder one, and the colder one had been load-bearing. She had never said any of it out loud. She had not needed to. It had simply been there underneath, the way a floor is there underneath, and she had walked around on it for most of her life without once looking down.

But there was no second reading. There was no ambiguity in it at all, and there was nothing left to be fair to. Her sister had never resented her. She had just loved her.

Myra’s ears went flat and stayed flat. Both tails stopped against the backs of her legs, as if they had been switched off at the wall.

Danielle did not notice. Danielle would not have noticed if the roof had come off. She had already got onto the next topic, and she was going to keep going, because a silence to Danielle was a place where somebody had not started yet.

“Seven hours?” Andy said, into a gap Myra could feel him open on purpose. “From where?”

It was enough. Danielle went off like a lit match: the route, the detour, the odd views, the strange driver, and Andy stood there and let her, and he did not once turn to Myra to check. He knew something was in the room. He had no idea what it was, and he was not going to go and find out with her sister standing there, and he filled the space so that nothing would be asked of her.

She put her hand flat against his back, once, where nobody else would see it.

Danielle ran out of breath eventually, which she did about every four minutes and which had never yet stopped her, and picked the box back up off the chair and put it into Myra’s hands.

“Okay,” Danielle said, wet and delighted. “Okay. I’m a disaster. I am a complete disaster and I don’t care even slightly.”

“Thank you,” Myra said. “That’s… thank you.”

It was the same two words she gave everybody. It was what she had left.

Danielle laughed at her own face, and wiped it with the side of her wrist, and gathered herself in about a second and a half, at a speed that only ever arrives in people nobody has ever had to worry about.

“I’m so glad,” Danielle said. “Myr. I’m so glad.” Impulsively, Myra reached out and took her sister in a hug, right, the only way she had to convey what she had just realized.

Then the line behind her moved, and it took Danielle with it, off toward the tables and the long windows, and Myra stood where she was with the box in both hands.

She did not open it. She could not have said, afterward, how long she stood there before she moved.

---

Dawn had a glass of water in each hand and nobody to give them to.

She had got them for Emi and for Erin, both of whom had moved somewhere else in the four seconds it took, and now she was standing in the middle of the floor holding two glasses. It kept happening. It had been happening all day. It was not that there was nothing to do; it was that every single thing she reached for had already been done by somebody else, and her hands kept going out anyway, at intervals, on their own.

Andy came off the doors with an older man and an older woman who could only be his parents and brought them straight over, and Claire came with them.

“Mom, Dad — this is Dawn. And this is Claire.” And then somebody said his name behind him and the line took him back, and the four of them were left standing there, and Andy was gone before Dawn had got one of the glasses set down.

Carol Cooper already had her spreadsheet out.

It was a real spreadsheet, printed, four or five pages of it stapled at the corner, the pages gone soft along the edges from being folded into a handbag and taken out again. There were pen marks all down it. There was a column drawn in freehand along the right-hand margin that had not come out of any printer, with a heading Dawn did not get a good enough look at to read.

Carol got the pages under one arm and got Dawn into a hug with the other, one-handed and entirely undeterred by it, two glasses of water between them and neither of them doing anything about that, and held on a second past where Dawn had braced for it to end.

“Dawn,” Carol declared, with enormous satisfaction. “Dawn. Oh, I have been waiting to put a face to you. You have no idea. He talks about you, honey. Laura, too.”

“Oh — that’s—” Dawn found she had both glasses up against her chest like a shield and put them down on the nearest table. “That’s very nice. That’s him being nice.”

“It is not.” Carol clicked her pen. “Now. What do you actually do with yourself, at home?”

Nobody had asked her that in a long time. People asked what she was, here, or how long she had been here, or what it was like, and all of those had short answers she had worn smooth. Nobody in months had asked about at home. The honest answer came out before the polite one could get in front of it.

“I work the front desk at a hotel,” Dawn said. “The Harrington, in Chicago. And I’ve got two brothers, so—them, really. After my mom died it was pretty much them.”

Carol’s hand stopped on the page. “How old were you?”

Dawn turned one of the glasses around on the table by a quarter. “I was still in school.”

Carol did not make anything of it. She did not gasp, or put a hand to her chest, or say any of the six things Dawn had been braced for since the first time somebody asked. She reached over and squeezed Dawn’s arm once, above the elbow, and let go, and looked back down at her page as if the page needed her more.

Jim Cooper had been standing a pace back with a drink he was not drinking. Carol took it off him without looking up from her page, put it down, and put a full one into his hand off a tray going past, and he took that one and did not drink it either.

“Still at that desk?” Jim said.

Dawn took a second longer over that than the question needed. “Still at it. Still junior, technically. There’s a word for it on the badge and everything.”

“Hm.” Jim turned his own glass a quarter turn. “Two boys raised off a front-desk wage is harder work than about ninety percent of what gets called a job in this country.”

Dawn laughed, which surprised her.

“Somebody should have told my father that,” Dawn admitted.

“Well. Welcome to the family, Dawn,” Jim said.

She felt her shoulders come down off her ears, and she left them down, and Carol was already moving.

“Claire,” Carol said, and her whole voice changed. “Claire Freeman. Oh, honey.”

Claire’s ears came up and went a little back. She had her notebook against her hip and she did not reach for it yet.

“I want you to know something,” Carol said. “My son did not stop talking about you for two years. Two solid years of high school. That is how Jim and I first heard your name, off a sixteen-year-old boy at a kitchen table who could not get through a school day without working it in. And I always wondered, privately, whether any of it went the other way. I never knew. I am not going to stand here and pretend I did.”

Claire went very still. Her tail curled in tight against her leg and stayed there, and her ears stayed back, and for a second Dawn thought she was going to write nothing at all.

Then Claire opened the notebook and wrote, taking her time about it, and turned it around.

I didn't really understand what was happening, then. But I remembered him ever since.

Carol laughed — a real one, loud, delighted, the kind of laugh that makes a stranger three feet away turn round to find out what he missed — and let the whole thing go.

She pushed the notebook gently back toward Claire’s chest with two fingers. “Fine. Fine. It all worked out.”

Carol wrote something in the margin. She did it without breaking stride and without hiding it, and whatever it was took four words and a check mark, and Dawn found she badly wanted to know what was in the column she couldn’t see.

Her next two rows went fast, because she already had those faces. She caught Erin going past with an empty tray and tapped the page where Erin’s own name sat.

“Still accurate,” Carol said. “Nothing’s changed since I wrote it.”

“Give it a month,” Erin called back, and bumped Carol’s shoulder affectionately with her own on the way past, and was gone.

Laura arrived a moment later, all three of her, moving in step, and stopped in front of Jim. “Hi, Dad,” She said, all three voices at once, not echoing but landing together.

Dawn had been half turned away to put down the glasses, and she turned the rest of the way back for it, because it was the first time any of them had heard her say it out loud.

Jim’s hand went to the back of his own neck. He stood there for a second with it there.

“That’s good to hear,” Jim said, gruff, and then he put his arms out and got all three of her at once, which took some doing, and which he had plainly worked out in advance, as if he had gone over the geometry of it at some point when nobody was watching.

Emily arrived out of the crowd behind them with two glasses of the same thing and put one into Dawn’s hand without being asked, which was new, and stood where she could see all of them at once.

Carol had gone up on her toes to see over the crowd. Away across the room, near the doors, Myra was still working her way through the last of the line with her hands full of a stranger’s hands, and Carol lifted an arm and waved at her instead of crossing over. Myra’s head came round. One hand waved high, and then she turned back to the man in front of her.

A few steps further and Carol stopped again. Emi was over by the gift table with her parents, all six hands moving, passing boxes down to her father to stack in a wall that was already taller than he was.

Carol waved. Emi waved with three of them.

“Both of those women are getting properly cornered before this night is out,” Carol told Jim. “Spreadsheet or no spreadsheet.”

Jim nodded, already looking to see who was next.

Andy came back through the group with half a question already out of his mouth. “Hey, has anyone—”

“Back to your line,” Carol said, without looking up, the pen still going. She got something off the nearest tray and put it in his hand on the way past. “Go on. Eat that. Before you get in trouble.”

He went. Emily watched him go and then turned round to Jim with the ghost of something rueful on her.

“So,” Emily ventured. “Am I passing inspection, or is there a form?”

Jim did not leave her hanging on it for a second. “He talks about you the way he used to talk about Claire,” Jim said. “That settled it for me.” Claire had not moved from where Carol left her. She wrote one line and held it up at Emily rather than at Jim, and Emily read it and laughed with her hand over her mouth, and Dawn did not get to see what it said.

Emily’s shoulders came down all at once.

“Thank you,” Emily said, laughing.

“You are welcome,” Jim said. Then, to nobody in particular, and without a pause: “Drive up was worth it. And my wife has a whole row left to do before dinner gets away from her.”

Outside, a long way off, something rolled over and kept rolling, and the long windows carried the sound and let it go. Two people near the drinks looked up. Dawn knew exactly what it was, and Emily beside her knew, and neither of them said anything, and after a moment Emily put her arm through Dawn’s and left it there.

Carol tapped her pen twice against the page. Then she folded the whole thing against her chest, and all of them turned around together to go and find Andy.