Are you going to help me carry these vases or are you going to keep sitting there.”

We carried the vases out to her van, in eleven trips, across a car park, at half past eleven at night, two women from the class of 2006 who had known each other for twenty years and spoken for two.

And on the last trip she stopped by the open back doors and looked at the water for a second and said, without any particular weight:

“You know the worst thing?

I still like weddings.”

And I said, “That’s not the worst thing.”

And she said, “No.

It really isn’t.”

And we put the last of the vases in, and she shut the doors, and drove to Jacksonville, and I drove to Palm Beach, to a house with a new window in the kitchen and a gate that does not stick, and I got in at about one in the morning and slept until nine, which I had not done in two years.