Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

“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.

In order to get into Pyotr’s car, Kate had to enter from the driver’s side and struggle past the stick shift to the passenger’s side. This was because the passenger-side door seemed to have been caved in by something, and it no longer opened. She didn’t ask what had happened. It was pretty clear that Pyotr had been driving even more distractedly than usual.

She put her tote on the floor among an assortment of discarded flyers, and then she fumbled beneath her for whatever the lump was that she was sitting on. It turned out to be Pyotr’s cell phone. Once he was settled behind the wheel, she held it toward him and asked, “Were you texting while driving ?” He didn’t respond; just grabbed it away from her and stuffed it into the right front pocket of his shorts. Then he twisted the key in the ignition, and the engine roared to life with a grinding sound.

Before he could back out of his parking space, though, Dr. Battista rapped his knuckles on Pyotr’s side window. Pyotr cranked the window down and barked, “What!”

“I’m dropping Bunny off at home and then I’m going straight to the lab,” Dr. Battista told him. “I’ll talk to the police after I check things out. See you two at the reception, I guess.”

Pyotr merely nodded and shifted violently into reverse.

Barreling down the Jones Falls Expressway, he seemed to feel the need to relive every last second of the tragedy. “I stand there; I think, ‘What am I seeing?’ I think, ‘I will just blink my eyes and then everything will be normal.’ So I blink, but racks are still empty. No cages. Writing on wall looks shouting, looks loud. But room is very, very still; has no motion. You know that mice are always moving. They rustle and they squeak; they hurry to the front when they hear anybody coming; they find humans…promising. Now, nothing. Stillness. Four, five cedar chips on bare floor.”

His window was still open and the wind was whipping her hair into snarls, but Kate decided not to mention it.

“I am so not wanting to believe it that I turn and walk into other room. As if mice just maybe took themselves elsewhere. I say, ‘Khello?’ I don’t know why I say, ‘Khello?’ Is not as if they could answer.”

“You want to veer left at this fork,” Kate said, because they were traveling so fast that it seemed he might not be planning to do that. At the last second he swerved violently, throwing her against her door, and shortly afterward he took a speedy right onto North Charles Street without checking for traffic. ( He certainly felt no hesitation about merging.) “I never trusted that Bunny, right from start,” he told Kate. “So baby-acting. Is like what they say in my country about—”

“Bunny didn’t do this,” Kate told him. “She doesn’t have the nerve.”

“Of course she did it. I told police she did it.”

“You what?”

“Detective wrote her name down in notebook.”

“Oh, Pyotr!”

“She knows combination of lock, and she is vegetable eater,” Pyotr said.

“Lots of people are vegetarians, but that doesn’t make them burglars,” Kate said. She braced her feet against the floor; they were approaching an amber light. “Besides, she’s not really a vegetarian; she just says she is.”

Pyotr sped up even faster and sailed through the light. “She is a vegetarian,” he said. “She made you take the meat from the mush-dish.”

“Yes, but then she keeps stealing my beef jerky.”

“She is stealing your beef jerky?”

“I have to change my hiding place every couple of days because she’s always swiping it. She’s no more vegetarian than I am! It’s just one of those phases, one of those teenage fads. You have to tell the police she didn’t do it, Pyotr. Tell them you made a mistake.”

“Anyway,” Pyotr said gloomily, “what is the difference who did it? Mice are vanished. All that care we took for them; now they are scampering the streets of Baltimore.”

“You really think animal lovers would turn a bunch of cage-reared mice loose in city traffic? They do have some common sense. Those mice are stashed away someplace safe and protected, with all their antibodies or whatever perfectly intact.”

“Please do not contradict me,” Pyotr said.

Kate rolled her eyes at the ceiling, and neither one of them spoke again.

Dr. Battista’s plan had been for Kate to start wearing her mother’s wedding ring after the ceremony, and she had brought it with her to the church. But it had not been mentioned during the vows — a sign, perhaps, that Uncle Theron was more flustered by the general tumult than he had let on — and so now she bent and drew her billfold from her tote and took the ring out of the coin compartment. The wedding ring was yellow gold and her engagement ring was white gold, but her father had told her that was perfectly acceptable. She slipped it onto her finger and returned her billfold to her tote.