Clara went on. “Make enough wrong choices, you’ll figure out what the right ones are. Like by deduction.” She shrugged. “I’m proud of him. I admire him.”
“Did I tell you we ran into Clayton?” said Jess, on the topic of wrong choices. “Last year, in a bookstore.” She and Adam had been browsing and she had found her ex-boyfriend in the fiction section. He seemed shorter than she remembered. When he saw her, he tried to hide by taking a book off the shelf and flipping through it. “Except that he was standing at the very beginning of the fiction section, where all the sexy books by Anonymous are shelved, so he was hiding his face behind a giant screaming vulva.”
“Do vulvas scream?”
“Some do,” said Jess. “Anyway, I went over and said hi. It was awkward.”
“Clayton was always awkward.”
“I can’t believe it, really, me and him,” she said. “How does anything ever happen, really? The way we jump out of one life and into another.” Jess looked at Clara. “So what’s your plan then? For after the wedding. Are you staying here?” At her mother’s, Jess meant.
Clara said, “Hell, no. With Diane and Julie? Like a holy trinity? They both live along the concession.” A funny term, the official name for the rural roads that divided the land into rectangles and squares. Bucolic yes, but to live there would be conceding something, Jess knew. “And I’d murder my mother,” said Clara. “Or else she’d murder me first. I think I had to stay away so long just to make sure there was no danger of being pulled back again.”
From somewhere in the house, Jess heard the baby cry and her milk let down in response, soaking the pads insideher nursing bra. Her body had become a strange machine with its own operating instructions. The cries grew louder, closer.
“The baby’s amazing, Jess,” said Clara. “You must be over the moon.”
“Over the moon,” Jess repeated, because nobody understood when she tried to explain the way it really was. She had thought Clara might, but maybe she didn’t want to know. The way a person can get everything she wanted but it’s too much to carry. Jess said it again, “I’m over the moon.”
—
“What were you doing in the closet?” Adam asked when she and Clara finally opened the door and tumbled out of the stairwell, blinking as their eyes adjusted to the light. He pushed a screaming Bella into Jess’s arms. “You’ve got to calm her down,” he said. And more quietly, so only she could hear, “I don’t know anyone. You left me alone.”
“It wasn’t a closet,” said Jess, jiggling the baby out of her plum-faced indignation. All it took was a little distraction. The baby was fed, so it wasn’t even about the boobs—although really, it was always about the boobs. Jess was the mother and Adam the father, and her presence always meant more. She didn’t even have to do anything, just be there, but when she wasn’t there all hell would break loose, much to Adam’s frustration and her own. Bella was quiet now. “I wasn’t gone that long.”
“It was long,” he said.
“We were on the stairs. Catching up,” she said. She watched Clara make her way down the hall, where she couldn’t hear them. “Did you meet Nick? The grey-haired guy?”
“I thought that was her dad,” said Adam.
“Her dad is dead,” said Jess.
“See, how was I supposed to remember that?” said Adam. “I told you you shouldn’t have left me alone.”
They took turns holding Bella during dinner so they both had a chance to eat, which worked all right until dessert, which was accompanied by speeches during which Bella needed to be kept quiet. Clara’s mother and her uncle spoke, then her sister. Then Nick stood up.
“Clare,” Nick began.
He could be talking about a stranger, thought Jess.
“The first time I met her, she told me the music in my bar was wrong. She came back behind the counter and she went through my CDs. She turned off the Happy Mondays in the middle of a song and put on Lucinda Williams. Like my place was a honky-tonk. I thought the vibe would be all off, but it wasn’t. And that would be the first but not the last time that Clare would set me straight.”
Nick was charming, Jess would give him that.
“Some people told us that we were a terrible match,” he said. “I was too old, she was too free, but we did it anyway, in spite of ourselves. We fell in love, head over heels. She came around behind my bar, and I don’t let anybody come behind my bar, but she didn’t know that—or rather, she didn’t care. I started to find that the nights when she wasn’t there weren’t very good ones. I discovered Clare can make a day complete just by walking into the room.”
Bella was fussing, so Jess pulled up her shirt and unsnapped her bra. Adam whispered, “What are you doing?” Jess was going off the feeding schedule, but Bella wasn’t falling asleep, and Jess needed to hear what else Nick had to say.
“Clare has turned my life into a different world,” he was saying, and Jess felt a vivid and familiar stirring, the same feeling she’d had all those years ago clamouring up the stairs behind Clayton to Clara’s room. Surely she wasn’t jealous? But Nick seemed to know Clara so well after all, to care about her in a way it was impossible not to take seriously. All of this was surprising, because Jess had imagined this wedding business to be something of a whim.
As Bella latched on and starting gulping, Adam waited a moment before asking, “Do you think it’s a good idea?”
“She’ll be fine,” she reassured him.
“But the routine—” Adam insisted.
“Screw the routine,” whispered Jess, just as the baby coughed and spat up everything she’d just ingested.
