One Last Thing Before I Go

marriage, had given her a hug and agreed instantly to marry her and Rich. And even as she was moved to tears in his embrace, she felt guilty, like she was somehow taking a cheap shot at Silver. She wondered if maybe, subconsciously, she was. She didn’t think so, but she couldn’t be sure. Lately, her subconscious seemed to have an agenda all its own.
    Henny is on her knees now, her mouth full of straight pins, which she is pulling out one by one to stab into the fabric at the small of Denise’s back. Denise can feel the woman’s breath on her spine, and it chills her unpleasantly.
    The first time she got married, her mother had accompanied her to her first fitting in this very bridal shop, had cried the first time she saw her in the gown. They had both cried, missing her father, who had died a few years earlier. Then Silver had shown up early to pick her up, and he, too, seemed to be fighting back tears at the sight of her in the white gown. The seat her mother sat in is still there, against the wall next to the couch, but her mother is long gone. Breast cancer. And Silver is long gone, and she hasn’t told Rich about this fitting, and besides he’s working anyway, and Casey . . . don’t get her started on Casey . . .
    “Why are you crying?” Henny says, her accent further complicated by the pins protruding from between her lips like fangs.
    And she is, she realizes, turning to see the tears disappearing into the shadows of her bruise before reemerging on her cheek. She is getting married in two weeks, and she has never felt more alone in her life.
    “You look beautiful.”
    The man’s voice comes from behind them, startling them both. She turns around to the source of the voice and, seeing him there, she is only surprised that she isn’t more surprised. Silver is standing against the wall like he’s been there for a while, leaning in that way he has that always makes it seem like he belongs. He smiles at her, a small open smile, and it’s been forever since she’s seen that smile, and she feels it in her belly. That was how he used to smile at her, before things changed and his expression grew guarded, his eyes unable to rest on hers for more than a second at a time.
    “Hi,” he says.
    “Hi.”
    “Déjà vu.”
    She feels herself smiling. It’s incredible, she thinks, how worn and dirty love can get. But even as she thinks it, something in her bursts, and she can feel it spreading through her chest, and suddenly she is in motion, flying off the platform, practically knocking the needle-mouthed seamstress onto her ass, oblivious to the stream of Russian expletives that rise up and fill the room. She doesn’t remember getting there, and can no longer see him through the haze of tears, but she can feel his arms wrapping themselves around her as she collapses into him, sobbing like a baby.

CHAPTER 28
    T he baby boy is carried in by his grandmother on a pillow. He is wearing an ornate white bed shirt and a tiny white skullcap affixed to his head with two white straps. The crowd gathered in the large, festively decorated living room comes to a hushed silence. For a moment, there is no sound but the click and flash of the photographer, shooting the infant relentlessly as the grandmother, who is wearing so much makeup that she looks like a wax dummy, walks him into the center of the room. The women smile and cluck as the baby comes into view. His mother, looking frail and deflated in her maternity dress, smiles, but Silver can feel her ambivalence toward this ritual, as if it’s his own.
    Or maybe it is his own, and he’s just projecting.
    Denise, holding on to him, her breath lightly tickling his neck, the skin of her back, smooth and warm under his fingers. Casey had gotten moody after brunch, had decided to go see some friends, leaving him to make his way home from the North Point, and as he passed the bridal boutique, he happened to glance in and see that it was Denise up in front of the mirrors. He doesn’t know what made him go in—If he understood the thing in him that felt the need to see his ex-wife trying on her new bridal gown he’d probably understand pretty much everything—but either way, he hasn’t stopped reliving it since.
    “Baruch Haba,”
the mohel chants. Blessed is the one who arrives. Meaning the baby. Who, at this moment, is anything but blessed.
    The infant is just getting over the trauma of his birth, flushed from the warmth of the womb on a harrowing claustrophobic