Vinegar Girl

Chapter Ten

On her wedding morning, Kate opened her eyes to find Bunny sitting at the foot of her bed. “What, are you checking out my window seat?” she asked, although Bunny wasn’t even looking at the window seat. She was sitting tailor-fashion in her baby-doll pajamas, staring at Kate intently as if willing her to wake up.

“Listen,” she told Kate. “You don’t have to do this.”

Kate reached behind her to prop her pillow against her headboard. She glanced toward the sky outside; there was a whiteness to the light that made her wonder if rain might be on the way, although the forecast was for sunshine. (Aunt Thelma had been reporting the forecast throughout the past week, because she was hoping to serve drinks on her patio before the “wedding banquet,” as she had taken to calling it.)

“I know you think you’re just doing a little something on paper to fool Immigration,” Bunny said, “but this guy is starting to act like he owns you! He’s telling you what last name to use and where to live and whether to go on working. I mean, I do think it would be nice if I could have a bigger room, but if the price for that is my only sister getting totally tamed and tamped down and changed into some whole nother person—”

“Hey. Bun-Buns,” Kate said. “I appreciate the thought, but do you not know me even a little? I can handle this. Believe me. It’s not as if I haven’t dealt my whole life with an…oligarch, after all.”

“An…”

“I’m not that easily squashed. Trust me: I can take him on with one hand tied behind me.”

“Okay,” Bunny said. “Fine. If your idea of fun is sparring and squabbling, so be it. But you’re going to have to be around him all the time! Nobody’s even mentioned how soon you’ll be allowed to divorce him, but I bet it’s a year at least and meanwhile you’re sharing an apartment with someone who doesn’t say please or thank you or smile when you’d expect him to and thinks ‘How are you?’ means ‘How are you?’ and stands too close to people when he talks and never tells them, ‘I think maybe perhaps such-and-such,’ but always, flat-out, ‘You are wrong,’ and ‘This is bad,’ and ‘She is stupid’; no shades of gray, all black and white and ‘What I say goes.’ ”

“Well, part of that is just a matter of language,” Kate said. “You can’t always be bothered with ‘please’ and ‘maybe’ when you’re struggling to get your basic message across.”

“And the worst of it is,” Bunny said, as if Kate hadn’t spoken, “the worst is, it won’t be any different from the fix you’re in here — living with a crazed science person who’s got a system for every little move you make and spouts off his old-man health theories every chance he gets and measures the polyphenols or whatever in every meal.”

“That’s not true at all,” Kate said. “It will be a lot different. Pyotr’s not Father! He listens to people, you can tell; he pays attention. And did you hear what he said the other night about how maybe I’d want to go back to school? I mean, who else has ever suggested that? Who else has even given me a thought? Here in this house I’m just part of the furniture, somebody going nowhere, and twenty years from now I’ll be the old-maid daughter still keeping house for her father. ‘Yes, Father; no, Father; don’t forget to take your medicine, Father.’ This is my chance to turn my life around, Bunny! Just give it a good shaking up! Can you blame me for wanting to try?”

Bunny looked at her dubiously.

“But thank you,” Kate thought to add, and she sat forward and patted Bunny’s bare foot. “You’re nice to be concerned.”

“Well,” Bunny said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Not until she’d left the room did Kate realize that Bunny hadn’t ended a single one of her sentences with a question mark.

—

It felt strange to have their father home in the daytime. He was sitting at the breakfast table when Kate came downstairs, a cup of coffee at his elbow and the newspaper spread before him. “Morning,” Kate told him, and he glanced up and adjusted his glasses and said, “Oh. Good morning. Do you know what’s going on in the world?”

“What?” Kate asked him, but he must have been referring to the news in general because he just waved a hand despairingly toward the paper and then returned to his reading.

He was wearing a pair of his coveralls. This was fine with Kate, but when Bunny walked into the kitchen a moment later she said, “You are not going to the church dressed like that.”

“Hmm?” her father said. He turned a page of his paper.

“You have to show some respect, Papa! This is some people’s house of worship; I don’t care what you believe personally. You need to at least put on a regular shirt and trousers.”

“It’s Saturday,” her father said. “Nobody else will be there, just us and your uncle.”

“What kind of photo will it make for Immigration, though?” Bunny asked. She could be surprisingly crafty, on occasion. “You in your work outfit. Sort of obvious, don’t you think?”

“Ah. Yes, you have a point,” he said. He sighed and folded his newspaper and stood up.

Bunny herself was wearing her angel-winged sundress, and Kate — motivated by a vague sense that she owed it to Uncle Theron — had put on a light-blue cotton shift that dated from college. She wasn’t accustomed to wearing pale colors and she felt uncomfortably conspicuous; she wondered if she seemed to be trying too hard. Apparently Bunny approved, though. At least, she offered no criticisms.

Kate took a carton of eggs from the fridge and asked Bunny, “Want an omelet?” but Bunny said, “No, I’m going to make myself a smoothie.”

“Well, be sure you clean up, then. Last smoothie you made, the kitchen was a disaster.”

“I cannot wait,” Bunny said, “till you are out of this house and not breathing down my neck all the time.”

Evidently she had overcome her concern about palming off her only sister.

A few days ago, Kate had hired a woman named Mrs. Carroll to come in every afternoon and do a little light housekeeping and serve as a companion to Bunny till Dr. Battista got home from work. Mrs. Carroll was the aunt of Aunt Thelma’s maid, Tayeema. Aunt Thelma had first suggested Tayeema’s younger sister, but Kate wanted someone seasoned who wouldn’t be susceptible to whatever Bunny tried to put over on her. “She is a whole lot cagier than some might realize,” Kate had told Mrs. Carroll, and Mrs. Carroll had said, “I hear you; yes, indeed.”

After breakfast, Kate went back upstairs and packed her last few odds and ends into her canvas tote. Then she changed her sheets for Bunny. She supposed this room would look very different the next time she laid eyes on it. There would be photos and picture postcards bristling around the mirror, and cosmetics crowding the bureau top, and clothes strewn across the floor. The thought didn’t disturb her. She had used this room up, she felt. She had used this life up. And after Pyotr got his green card she was not going to move back home, whatever her father might fantasize. She would find a place of her own, even if all she could afford was a little rented room somewhere. Maybe she would have her degree by then; maybe she’d have a new job.

She dumped her sheets in her hamper. They were Mrs. Carroll’s to deal with now. She picked up her tote and went back downstairs.

Her father was waiting in the living room, sitting on the couch drumming his fingers on his knees. He wore his black suit; once urged, he had gone all out. “Ah, there you are!” he said when she walked in, and then he rose to his feet and said, in a different voice, “My dear.”

“What?” she asked, because it seemed he was about to make some sort of announcement.

But he said, “Ah…” And then he cleared his throat and said, “You’re looking very grown up.”

She was puzzled; he had last seen her just minutes ago, looking exactly as she looked now. “I am grown up,” she told him.

“Yes,” he said, “but it’s somewhat of a surprise, you see, because I remember when you were born. Neither your mother nor I had ever held a baby before and your aunt had to show us how.”

“Oh,” Kate said.

“And now here you are in your blue dress.”

“Well, shoot, you’ve seen this old thing a million times,” Kate said. “Don’t make such a big deal of it.”

But she was pleased, in spite of herself. She knew what he was trying to say.

It crossed her mind that if her mother had known too — if she had been able to read the signals — the lives of all four of them might have been much happier.

For the first time, it occurred to her that she herself was getting much better at reading signals.

—

Her father drove, because being a passenger made him nervous. Their car was an elderly Volvo with countless scuff marks on the bumpers from other times he had driven, and the backseat was heaped with the mingled paraphernalia of their three lives — a rubber lab apron, a stack of journals, a construction-paper poster featuring the letter C, and Bunny’s winter coat. Kate had to sit back there because Bunny had snagged the front seat lickety-split. When the car jerked to an especially sudden stop at a traffic light on York Road, half of the journals slid onto Kate’s feet. The expressway would have been smoother, not to mention faster, but her father didn’t like merging.

Rhodos 3 for $25, she read as they passed the garden center where she sometimes shopped, and all at once she wished she were shopping there today, having a normal Saturday morning full of humdrum errands. It had turned out sunny, in the end, and you could tell by the slow, dreamy way people were drifting down the sidewalks that the temperature was perfect.

She was feeling as if she couldn’t get quite enough air in her lungs.

Uncle Theron’s church was called the Cockeysville Consolidated Chapel. It was a gray stone building with a miniature steeple on the roof — a sort of shorthand steeple — and it lay just behind the section of York Road that featured clusters of antique stores and consignment shops. Uncle Theron’s black Chevy was the only car in the lot. Dr. Battista pulled up next to it and switched the ignition off and collapsed for a moment with his forehead on the steering wheel, the way he always did when he had managed to get them someplace.

“No sign of Pyoder yet,” he said when he finally looked up.

Pyotr was in charge of the morning rounds today at the lab. “See?” Dr. Battista had said earlier. “From now on I’ll have a trusted son-in-law whom I can depend on to spell me.” However, he had already brought up several details that he worried Pyotr might chance to overlook. Twice before they left the house he had said to Kate, “Should I just telephone him and find out how things are going?” but then he had answered his own question. “No, never mind. I don’t want to interrupt him.” This may have been due not only to his phone allergy but also to the recent shift in his and Pyotr’s relationship. He still hadn’t quite gotten over his sulk.

They went to the rear of the building, as Uncle Theron had instructed them, and knocked at a plain wooden door that could have led to somebody’s kitchen. Its windowpanes were curtained in blue-and-white gingham. After a moment the gingham was drawn aside and Uncle Theron’s round face peered out. Then he smiled and opened the door for them. He was wearing a suit and tie, Kate was touched to see — treating this like a real occasion. “Happy wedding day,” he told her.

“Thanks.”

“I just got off the phone with your aunt. I imagine she was hoping against hope for a last-minute invitation, but she claimed she was only calling to ask if I thought Pyoder would object to champagne.”

“Why would he object to champagne?”

“She figured he might expect vodka.”

Kate shrugged. “Not as far as I know,” she said.

“Maybe she was thinking he might want to smash his glass in the fireplace or something,” Uncle Theron said. He was a good deal more cavalier about his sister when he was not in her presence, Kate noticed. “Come on into my office,” he said. “Does Pyoder know that he should knock on the back door?”

Kate sent a glance toward her father. “Yes, I told him,” he said.

“We can look at the vows while we’re waiting. I know we agreed that you’ll do just the bare minimum, but I want to show you what your choices are so you’ll know what you’ll both be promising.”

He led them down a narrow corridor to a small room crammed with books. Books overflowed the shelves and towered in piles on the desk and the seats of the two folding chairs and even the floor. Only the swivel chair behind the desk was usable, but Uncle Theron must have felt that it would have been rude to sit down and let the three of them remain standing. He leaned back against the front of his desk, half sitting on the edge of it, and plucked a book from the top of one stack and opened it to a dog-eared page. “Now, the beginning,” he said, running a finger along one line. “ ‘Dearly beloved’ and such. You have no objection to that, I assume.”

“No, that’s okay.”

“And should I ask, ‘Who gives this woman?’ ”

Dr. Battista drew a breath to answer, but Kate jumped in with “No!” so she didn’t hear whatever it was that he had planned to say.

“And I’m guessing we’ll do without the promise to obey — knowing you, Kate, heh-heh. Well, in fact almost no one keeps the ‘obey’ in, these days. We’ll just proceed straight to ‘For better or worse.’ Will ‘For better or worse’ be all right?”

“Oh, sure,” Kate said.

It was nice of him to be so accommodating, she thought. He hadn’t said a word about the Battistas’ known lack of religion.

“You’d be surprised at what some couples want omitted nowadays,” he said, closing the book and laying it aside. “And then the vows they write for themselves: some of those you wouldn’t believe. Such as ‘I promise not to talk more than five minutes a day about the cute things the dog did.’ ”

“You’re kidding,” Kate said.

“I’m not, I’m afraid.”

She wondered if she could get Pyotr to promise to stop quoting proverbs.

“How about photographs?” Dr. Battista asked.

“How about them?” Uncle Theron said.

“May I take some? During the vows?”

“Well, I suppose so,” Uncle Theron said. “But these are very brief vows.”

“That’s all right. I’d just like to get, you know, a record. And maybe you could snap a photo of the four of us together, afterward.”

“Certainly,” Uncle Theron said. He looked at his watch. “Well! All we need now is a groom.”

It was 11:20, Kate already knew, because she had just checked her own watch. They had arranged to do this at 11:00. But her father said confidently, “He’ll be along.”

“Is he bringing the license?”

“I have it.” Dr. Battista pulled it from his inner breast pocket and handed it to him. “Then on Monday we’ll get things started with Immigration.”

“Well, let’s go ahead to the chapel where you can all wait more comfortably, shall we?”

“They have to be actually married before they can apply,” Dr. Battista said. “It needs to be a fait accompli, evidently.”

“Have you met Miss Brood?” Uncle Theron asked. He had stopped at another doorway leading off from the corridor. A pale woman in her mid-forties, her short fair hair drawn girlishly back from her forehead with a blue plastic barrette, glanced up from her desk and smiled at them. “Miss Brood is my right hand,” he told them. “She’s here seven days a week sometimes, and it’s only a part-time position. Avis, this is my niece Kate, who’s getting married today, and her sister, Bunny, and my brother-in-law, Louis Battista.”

“Congratulations,” Miss Brood said, rising from her chair. She had turned a bright pink, for some reason. She was one of those people who look teary-eyed when they blush.

“Tell them how you got the name ‘Avis,’ ” Uncle Theron said. Then, without waiting for her to speak, he said to the others, “She was delivered in a rental car.”

“Oh, Reverend Dell,” Miss Brood said with a tinkly laugh. “They don’t want to hear about that!”

“It was an unexpected birth,” Uncle Theron explained. “Unexpectedly rapid, that is. Of course the birth itself was expected.”

“Well, naturally! It’s not as if Mama intended to have me in the car,” Miss Brood said.

Dr. Battista said, “Thank God it wasn’t a Hertz.”

Miss Brood gave another tinkly laugh, but she kept her eyes on Uncle Theron. She was fiddling with the strand of white glass beads at her throat.

“Well, moving right along…” Uncle Theron said.

Miss Brood went on smiling as she lowered herself to her chair again with a scooping motion at the back of her skirt. Uncle Theron led the rest of them on down the corridor.

The chapel itself, which Kate had seen on several long-ago Christmas Eves and Easter Sundays, was a modern-looking space, with wall-to-wall beige carpeting and plain clear windows and blond wooden pews. “Why don’t you all have a seat,” Uncle Theron told them, “and I’ll head back to my office where I can hear when Pyoder knocks.”

Kate had been worrying about that — whether they might miss Pyotr’s knock — so she was glad to see him go. Also, they wouldn’t have to make small talk if they were on their own. They could sit in silence.

She listened closely to her uncle’s footsteps receding down the corridor, because she was wondering if he would pause or at least slow down as he approached Miss Brood’s doorway. But no, he hurried right past, oblivious.

“This church is where your mother and I were married,” Dr. Battista said.

Kate was startled. She had never thought to ask where they had married.

Bunny said, “Really, Papa? Was it a big fancy wedding with bridesmaids?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, she had her heart set on the whole damn farce,” he said. “And Theron had just been hired here as assistant pastor, so nothing would do but that he should officiate. My sister had to come all the way from Massachusetts, bringing my mother. My mother was still alive in those days though not in the best of health, but oh, it was ‘We need to have your family at this’ and ‘Haven’t you got any friends? Any colleagues?’ My postdoc served as my best man, I seem to recall.”

He rose and began pacing up and down the center aisle. He always grew restless when he had to sit idle for any time. Kate looked toward the pulpit, which was made of the same blond wood as the pews. A gigantic book, presumably a Bible, lay open on top of it, with several red ribbon bookmarks hanging out of it, and in front of the pulpit was a low wooden altar with a vase of white tulips centered on a doily. She tried to picture her mother standing there as a bride with a younger, less stuffy version of her father, but all she could summon up was the image of a limp invalid in a long white dress, alongside a bald and stooped Dr. Battista consulting his wristwatch.

A text message came in for Bunny; Kate recognized the tweeting sound. Bunny drew her phone from her purse and looked at it and giggled.

Their father stopped beside a pew and took a leaflet from the hymnal rack. He studied the front of it and the back, and then he returned it to the rack and resumed pacing.

“I hope nothing’s gone wrong at the lab,” he told Kate the next time he passed her.

“What could go wrong?” she asked him.

She honestly wanted to know, because whatever it was would be preferable to Pyotr’s simply deciding he found it too off-putting to marry her no matter how advantageous it was. “Would not be worth it,” she could hear him saying. “Such a difficult girl! So unmannerly.”

But all her father said was “Anything could go wrong. Any number of things. Oh, I had a feeling I shouldn’t leave it in Pyoder’s hands! I realize the fellow’s phenomenally able, but still, he isn’t me, after all.”

Then he continued toward the rear of the church.

Bunny was typing a text now. Tap-tap-tap, as rapid as the telegraph keys in old movies, using both her thumbs and hardly needing to look at the screen.

Eventually, Uncle Theron reappeared. “So…” he called from the doorway. He walked toward the pew where Bunny and Kate were sitting, and Dr. Battista reversed course to join them.

“So, does Pyoder have to come from very far away?” Uncle Theron asked.

“Just my lab,” Dr. Battista told him.

“Is he subject to a foreign standard of time?”

He was looking at Kate as he asked this. She said, “A foreign…? Well, maybe. I’m not sure.”

Then she realized from his expression that she ought to be sure, if they had been dating for long. She would have to remember that for their interview with Immigration. “Oh, he’s hopeless!” she would say merrily. “I tell him we’re due at our friends’ house at six and he doesn’t even start dressing till seven.”

If they ever actually got so far as an interview.

“Perhaps a phone call to find out if he needs directions,” Uncle Theron said.

It was silly of her, she knew, but Kate didn’t want to make a phone call. She was reminded of those obsessive discussions that girls had in seventh grade — how they wouldn’t like to be seen “chasing a boy.” Even if this was the boy (so to speak) who was marrying her, it felt wrong. Let him show up as late as he liked! See if she cared.

Lamely, she said, “He’s probably on the road. I wouldn’t want to distract him.”

“Just send him a text,” Bunny told her.

“Well, um…”

Bunny clucked and returned her phone to her purse and then held a hand toward Kate, palm up. Kate stared at it a moment before she understood. Then, as slowly as possible, she dug her own phone from her tote and passed it over.

Tap-tap-tap, Bunny went, without even seeming to think about it. Kate sent a sidelong glance toward what she was writing. “Where r u,” she read, beneath the last message Pyotr had sent Kate, which dated from a couple of days ago and said simply, “Okay bye.”

This seemed significant now.

No answer. None of those little dots, even, that meant he was working on an answer. They all looked helplessly at Uncle Theron. “Perhaps a phone call?” he suggested again.

Kate steeled herself and took her phone back from Bunny. At the same instant, it made a soft swooping sound, which startled her so that she fumbled and dropped it, but only in her lap, luckily. Bunny gave another cluck and picked it up. “ ‘A terrible event,’ ” she read out.

Their father said, “What!” He leaned past Uncle Theron and grabbed the phone out of Bunny’s hand and stared at it. Then he started typing. Just with one index finger, it was true, but still, Kate was impressed. They all watched him. Finally he said, “Now what do I do?”

“What do you mean, what do you do?” Bunny asked him.

“How do I send it?”

Bunny tsked and took the phone from him and punched the screen. Peering over her shoulder, Kate read their father’s message: “What what what.”

There was a wait. Dr. Battista was breathing oddly.

Then another swooping sound. “ ‘Mice are gone,’ ” Bunny read out.

Dr. Battista made a strangled, gasping noise. He buckled in the middle and crumpled onto the pew in front of them.

To Kate, the word “mice” made no sense, for a moment. Mice? What did mice have to do with anything? She was waiting for news of her wedding. Uncle Theron seemed equally uncomprehending. He said, “Mice!” with a look of distaste.

“The mice in Father’s lab,” Bunny explained to him.

“His lab’s got mice?”

“It has mice.”

“Yes…” Uncle Theron said, clearly not seeing the distinction.

“Guinea-pig mice,” Bunny elaborated.

Now he looked thoroughly confused.

“I can’t take it in,” Dr. Battista was saying faintly. “I can’t seem to absorb this.”

Another swooping sound came from the phone. Bunny held it up and read out, “ ‘The animal-rights activists stole them the project is in ruins all is lost there is no hope.’ ”

Dr. Battista groaned.

“Ah, yes, that kind of mice,” Uncle Theron said, his forehead clearing.

“Does he mean the PETA people?” Bunny asked everyone. “Is there some rule that grown-ups aren’t allowed to abbreviate, or what? ‘PETA,’ you idiot! Just say ‘PETA,’ for God’s sake! ‘Animal-rights activists,’ ha! The guy is so…plodding! And notice how all at once he puts a ‘the’ every place he possibly can, even though he almost never says ‘the’ when he’s talking.”

“All those years and years of work,” Dr. Battista said. He was doubled over now with his head buried in his hands, so that it was hard to make his words out. “Those years and years and years, all down the drain.”

“Oh, dear, now surely it can’t be that bad,” Uncle Theron said. “I’m sure this is repairable.”

“We’ll just buy you some new mice!” Bunny chimed in. She handed the phone back to Kate.

Kate was beginning to grasp the situation finally. She told Bunny, “Even you ought to know that only those mice will do. They’re at the end of a long line of generations of mice; they were specially bred.”

“So?”

“How did these people get into the lab?” Dr. Battista wailed. “How did they know the combination? Oh, God, I’ll have to start over from scratch, and I’m too old to start from scratch. It would take me another twenty years at the very least. I’ll lose all my funding and I’ll have to close the lab and drive a taxi for a living.”

“Heaven forbid!” Uncle Theron said in real horror, and Bunny said, “You’re going to make me drop out of school and get a job, aren’t you. You’re going to make me go to work serving raw bloody sirloins in some steakhouse.”

Kate wondered why they were both contemplating careers they were so unsuited for. She said, “Stop it, you two. We don’t know for sure yet whether—”

“Oh, what do you care?” her father demanded, raising his head sharply. “You’re just glad, I bet, because now you don’t have to get married.”

Kate said, “I don’t?”

Her uncle said, “Why would she have to get married?”

“And you!” Dr. Battista told Bunny. “So what if you drop out of school? No great loss! You’ve never shown the least bit of aptitude.”

“Poppy!”

Kate was staring at the hymnal rack in front of her. She was trying to get her bearings. She seemed to be experiencing a kind of letdown.

“So that’s it,” her father said bleakly. “Excuse me, Theron, will you? I need to get down to my lab.” He stood up by inches, like a much older man, and stepped into the aisle. “Why should I even go on living anymore?” he asked Kate.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” she snapped.

She would be reclaiming her old room, it appeared. Her life would pick up where it had left off. On Monday when she went in to work she would explain that things just hadn’t panned out. She would tell Adam Barnes that she wasn’t married after all.

This didn’t cheer her up in the least. Adam had nothing to do with her, really. He would always make her feel too big and too gruff and too shocking; she would forever be trying to watch her words when she was with him. He was not the kind of person who liked her true self, for better or worse.

This last phrase sent a little echo of sadness through her. It took her a moment to recollect why.

She rose and followed Bunny into the aisle. It felt as if she had lead in her stomach. All the color seemed to have been washed out of the room, and she saw how bland it was — a dead place.

She and Bunny stood waiting while their father shook their uncle’s hand — or more like clung to his hand, with both of his own, as if hanging on for dear life. “Thank you anyhow, Theron,” he said in a funereal voice. “I apologize for taking up your—”

“Khello?”

Pyotr was standing in the corridor doorway, with Miss Brood smiling anxiously behind his left shoulder. He wore an outfit so shabby that he looked like a homeless person: a stained white T-shirt torn at the neck and translucent with age, very short baggy plaid shorts that Kate worried might be his underwear, and red rubber flip-flops. “You!” he said too loudly. It was Bunny he was addressing. He charged into the chapel, and Miss Brood melted away again. “Do not think for one minute that you will not be arrested,” he told Bunny.

She said, “Huh?”

He arrived directly in front of her and set his face too close to hers. “You…vegetable eater!” he told her. “You bleedy-heart!”

Bunny took a step backward and dabbed at her cheek with the heel of one hand. He must have been spitting as he talked. “What is with you?” she asked him.

“You went to lab in dead of night; I know you did. I do not know where you took mice but I know it was you who did this thing.”

“Me!” Bunny said. “You think it was me who did it! You honestly believe I would mess up my own father’s project! You’re nuts. Tell him, Kate.”

Dr. Battista managed to slip in between them at this point. He said, “Pyoder, I need to know. How bad is it?”

Pyotr turned away from Bunny to clap a hand heavily on Dr. Battista’s shoulder. “Is bad,” he told him. “This is the truth. Is bad as it can get.”

“They’re all gone? Every one?”

“Every one. Both racks empty.”

“But how—?”

Pyotr was walking him toward the front of the chapel now, his hand still resting on Dr. Battista’s shoulder. “I wake up early,” he said. “I think I will go to lab early so I am in time for wedding. I get to door; is locked the same as always. I punch combination. I go inside. I go to mouse room.”

They slowed to a stop a few feet from the altar. Uncle Theron and Kate and Bunny stayed where they were, watching. Then Pyotr turned to look back at Kate. “Where are you?” he asked her.

“Me?”

“Come on! We get married.”

“Oh, well,” Dr. Battista said, “I don’t know if that’s really…I think I’d just like to get on down to the lab now, Pyoder, even if there’s nothing to—”

But Kate said, “Wait till we say our vows, Father. You can check the lab afterward.”

“Kate Battista!” Bunny said. “You are surely not going ahead with this!”

“Well…”

“Did you hear how he just talked to me?”

“Well, he’s upset,” Kate told her.

“I am not goddamned upset!” Pyotr bellowed.

“You see what I mean,” Kate told Bunny.

“Come here now!” Pyotr shouted.

Uncle Theron said, “Goodness, he is upset,” and he chuckled, shaking his head. He walked up the aisle to the altar, where he turned and held both arms out from his sides like an annunciating angel. “Kate, dear?” he asked. “Coming?”

Bunny gave a hiss of disbelief, and Kate turned and handed her tote to her. “Okay, fine,” Bunny told her. “Be like that. The two of you deserve each other.”

But she accepted the tote, and she trailed after Kate up the aisle.

At the altar, Kate took her place next to Pyotr. “I at first did not understand it,” Pyotr was telling Dr. Battista. “Was obvious what had happened, but still I did not understand. I am just staring. Two empty racks and no cages. Painted letters on wall next to racks, painted directly on wall: ANIMALS ARE NOT LAB EQUIPMENT. This is when I think to call police.”

“The police: oh, well, what can the police do?” Dr. Battista said. “It’s too late now for all that.”

“The police take a very, very long time and when they finally come they are not intelligent. They say to me, ‘Can you describe these mice, sir?’ ‘Describe!’ I say. ‘What to describe? They are ordinary Mus musculus; enough is said.’ ”

“Ah,” Dr. Battista said. “Quite right.” Then he said, “I don’t see why I had to get dressed up if you didn’t.”

“She is marrying me, not my clothes,” Pyotr said.

Uncle Theron cleared his throat. He said, “Dearly beloved…”

The two men turned to face him.

“We are gathered here in the presence…”

“There must be some way they can track them down, though,” Dr. Battista murmured to Pyotr. “Hire a rat terrier or something. Don’t they keep dogs for such purposes?”

“Dogs!” Pyotr said, turning slightly. “Dogs would eat them! You want this?”

“Or ferrets, perhaps.”

“Do you, Katherine,” Uncle Theron was saying, in an unusually firm voice, “take this man, Pyoder…”

Kate could sense Pyotr’s tension from the extreme rigidity of his body, and her father was jittering with agitation on the other side of him, and she could feel the waves of Bunny’s disapproval behind her. Only Kate herself was calm. She stood very straight and kept her eyes on her uncle.

By the time they got to “You may kiss the bride,” her father was already turning to leave the altar. “Okay, we go now,” Pyotr said, even while he was ducking forward to give Kate a peck on the cheek. “The policemen want—” he told Dr. Battista, and then Kate stepped squarely in front of him and took his face between both of her hands and kissed him very gently on the lips. His face was cool but his lips were warm and slightly chapped. He blinked and stepped back. “—policemen want to talk to you too,” he said faintly to Dr. Battista.

“Congratulations to both of you,” Uncle Theron said.