Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

“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.