“It’s not my wedding,” Greta replied. She connected male to female ports and felt a little dirty about it.
“You’ll probably find really dressy sweatpants for yours someday. Versace sweatpants.”
Greta rolled her eyes so hard she worried she might fall over.
Danny always used to DJ when school wasn’t in session, even during college. The equipment had paid for itself twelve times over, but Greta still didn’t understand why Danny accepted this gig. She saw the drag in his body, the way he still couldn’t listen to music for more than a few minutes without complaining of a headache. When she pushed him on the question, he gave her a look. “Friendship,” he said, but Greta had a suspicion he was anticipating seeing someone and that it wasn’t his dog.
The huge tent filled with guests and soon every chair had an occupant. Though the rain had let up a bit, attendees closest to the tent edge kept their umbrellas up, their laps getting soaked in the rainy cross-breeze.
A tall man in a blue vest approached Danny. Everything was about to begin. As soon as the blue-vested man scampered out of sight, the green lights strung above flashed on. An audible “ooh” came from the guests. The music started, something jazzy and sweet, but unplaceable.
First down the aisle was Franz, bow tie neatly in place. From what Greta could glean, Meg had moved in with Ginger and Leanne for a while, and they’d fallen in love with the mutt. How could you not? Greta thought bitterly. She missed the messy scruff of hair around his muzzle when he woke her up to go on their early morning walks.
After Franz completed his part, he pranced to the side of the platform and sat. Greta wanted to fetch him, but the rest of the wedding party was coming down the aisle. Meg and the man in the vest linked arms, synchronized and stepping carefully. The tarp shifted under them and sunk a quarter inch with each step. When Meg’s heel caught in a dip, Greta surprised herself by feeling relief when Meg didn’t fall on her face.
Ginger and Leanne came next, arm in arm. Leanne wore a pale green dress, like first spring leaves. The color accented her dark, shaved head and long bare arms. By her side, Ginger wore a long forest-green gown. The only matching feature were the garlands of white flowers wound around both of their heads. Unlike Meg with her stilted walk, these women glided. Greta assessed their footwear smugly. Flats, of course. Not that Greta herself had ever worn anything besides flats. Even if Greta were to marry, she would wear flats.
There was an unlikely thought. She breezed right past it.
Martha had worn spikey heels like ivory daggers the day she married. On her anniversary every year, Martha pulled the box out of her closet to marvel at them. Greta remembered comparing her feet to the shoes, the way the ratio of their size narrowed each year until finally Greta knew she could never fit into them. The family would gather around the dining room table, and Dad and Martha would open the huge album and point out details of their wedding day. Martha’s wedding dress had been a white blooming monstrosity with bubbled cap sleeves and pearl beading. Though Greta had never favored anything “girly” as a kid, she still had been in awe of that dress. When she touched it, she thought of Glinda. Dad, with his neatly pressed brown suit, wore his sideburns longer then. The differences in her parents, the little additions of hair or reductions of weight, always made Greta feel like she was looking at someone else in the old pictures. It was the unfamiliar expression more than anything, the dazed smile on Martha’s face as she leaned on Dad’s chest, that Greta had recognized the least.
Danny wore his poncho throughout this ceremony, with a tarp draped protectively over his equipment. But by the time Leanne and Ginger took their vows, the rain had stopped, and the wind blew the clouds into wavy wisps. Men packed up the chairs and tables while the guests mingled in the wet grass by the lake. The sun peeked out for the reception, and when Leanne and Ginger cut the cake, Greta’s stomach rumbled in the late afternoon sun that knifed across their tent corner.
“Do we get dinner?” Greta murmured to Danny. When she didn’t receive a response, she elbowed him, and he took out an earplug.
“What?”
She’d forgotten about those damn earplugs, but they were probably the only thing keeping him here. Already his eyes were drooping. His doctor had been lukewarm on the idea of a six-hour outing. So had Greta, in all honesty, but for more selfish reasons. They were here now, though. She weighed the embarrassment of talking to other humans with the possibilities of low blood sugar. “I’m getting food.”
Danny nodded and held up a number two on his fingers before replacing the earplug. Reconnaissance went smoothly. She cut in front of a table of poky older relatives and eyed the buffet for something palatable. Labels described the food: one dish was “tempeh” something, and some had phrases like “a play on,” which always put Greta on guard. If she wanted “a play on” something, she would add barbecue sauce to a hamburger. She managed to find rice pilaf with some cherry tomatoes and fresh mozzarella chunks. She grabbed some crusty rolls of bread with butter rosettes. She assumed it was real butter, but maybe it was a play on butter.
On her way back to the DJ table, Greta felt eyes on the back of her head and turned around too quickly. A cherry tomato bailed over the side of the plate, which Greta decided was Danny’s. Caught in the act, Meg’s face turned downward from her seat at the head table. With its position on the podium, the DJ table and the head table were within shouting distance of each other. Greta wondered as she plopped down Danny’s plate whether Meg had requested to be on the side farthest from them or if that had been the couple’s decision.
Danny gave a nod of thanks. He speared a mozzarella ball and returned his attention to the screen. His selection of dinner music was overly sentimental, Greta thought. Acoustic versions of love ballads. Greta hoped his strength wasn’t failing him now, with kryptonite just fifteen feet away. Physically, he seemed almost his pre-aneurysm self. He no longer needed a cane, his hair had grown back, and he had even put back some of the weight he had lost. In other ways, he was likely never to be the same. It was hard to quantify things that set him off—noise, exhaustion, too much activity. Greta wasn’t too good with the unquantifiable.
She weighed words that she could use to get him to take a break. Sometimes she felt like she walked the fine line between commandant and conspirator. She just wanted him to be the more responsible one again, the one who had things figured out. More often lately, he was chafing under her help, and she hated that. She just wanted to cocoon him until he was perfectly healed.
“He will never be perfectly healed,” she imagined Dr. Traeger saying. “And that’s the truth.”
“He’ll never be the same Danny,” an imaginary Pam said. “And that’s life.”
“He will always be your brother,” a ghost Dad said. “And that’s luck.”
“Can I give it a shot?” she said, pointing to the computer. “I swear I won’t break anything.”
He agreed, pushing back for a moment from the table and rubbing a hand over his eyes.
As the sun disappeared under the crust of the lake, the dinner tables were spirited away. Danny resumed the next set.
A bark made Greta look up from the novel in her lap. Franz nestled his muzzle on Greta’s pants. Panting, he leaned his head to the side as if she couldn’t find the right place to scratch his ears otherwise. Greta scratched. Meg appeared, decidedly shorter, having left her heels somewhere. “Could you take him for a walk?” she asked.
Greta glanced at Danny, who stared at the computer. He hadn’t been drinking, but his face suddenly flushed. In the background “Sweet Caroline” rang out, as cheesy as a Wisconsin farm, but nobody seemed to mind. The group on the floor danced with sloshing solo cups and intoning the “Bah-bah-bahs.” Ginger spun with the man in the vest. When the song ended, Danny picked up the mic. “The help is taking five.”
“Take ten,” Leanne shouted from somewhere in the group.
Danny took one of the wax earplugs out of his ear, but not the other.
“Hi,” he said.
Meg handed the leash to Greta. “Thanks for doing this.”
Greta took a few steps away, realizing she hadn’t agreed to anything. Franz didn’t seem to mind nosing around in the grass near the edge of the tent.
“How could you hear the music with earplugs?” Meg asked. “I just noticed.”
He shrugged. “Well enough.”
Franz nosed at the tent stakes and rope, shaking free some collected rainwater on a lower corner of the tent’s roof. Greta covered her head.
Oblivious to the drips, Danny asked Meg, “Having a good summer break?”
She gave some noncommittal nothing about new textbooks and added, “So, are you coming back? To the school?”
Greta led Franz, newly mud-spattered, to a different shadowed corner to get a better look. Danny nodded slowly, fingers tapping the computer keyboard soundlessly. “I’m going to try. I haven’t been able to …” He stopped. “I guess brain injury only gets you so much time off.”
His eyes were back on the screen. Was he queuing up music while she stood there? Greta shouldn’t have worried so much. He sounded as dispassionate as a kid in the dentist’s chair. Meg must have heard something too, or the lack of something, because she blushed suddenly. The blush spread down to her collarbones; a stretch of bare skin highlighted in pink. She touched the necklace that hung there. When she didn’t say anything more, Danny replaced his earplug. The music started again, twangy opening chords of the next song. Greta saw her cue.
She handed the leash back to Meg. “I don’t actually know if he pooped or not,” she said honestly. “So watch for land mines out there.”
Meg took the leash, not looking back over her shoulder as she meandered back into the swarm of dancing bodies.
“Want some cake?” Greta asked. When Danny didn’t answer, she didn’t bother to ask again. She snagged two pieces of cake (“A play on strawberry rhubarb pie” the label read) and a beer from the cash bar to wash it down.
Greta ate one slice of cake, then the second. By the time she’d finished, she caught Danny’s gaze. It wasn’t directed at her, of course, but the fairy-lit dance floor. In the darker night, the green lights glimmered brighter and turned Meg’s hair a kiwi color. She twisted. She turned. Danny cued up another song, and Greta felt him looking closely at the playlist. After the next song, Meg’s hair fell loose from her bun and tangled around her face in curls and waves.
At ten, Danny rested his head on his elbows.
“Time to go,” Greta said. Not a question. At the signs of him packing up, Ginger rushed over and gave him a tight hug, and Leanne plugged in her iPhone. The dancing bodies barely paused their twirling, turning, twisting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The third of July began bright and, as her grandfather would mumble, as hot as the devil’s tit. The heat certainly warmed Greta’s breasts. When she woke on her futon Saturday morning sweat had pooled between them. Broken air-conditioning. She dragged Danny out of bed so they could find refuge downtown. Between the board game store and the farmer’s market booths and everything else, she was sure he could find some distraction on Main Street while she wrote for a few hours in air-conditioned sanctity.
Café Diem offered the best coffee in Ames, and Greta found herself writing her dissertation there that morning. Long descriptive passages of ant behavior made up the initial section. Ants used scent and also sunlight to navigate, a trend backed up not only by research (see endnotes 12, 15, and 16) but also by observation. The glass dome of the butterfly house had no artificial light. On clear days, the refraction of the light blinded. On foggy days, the air inside held its humidity so that she was inside a cloud.
Blah blah blah. She felt sick of her own voice, except she wasn’t saying anything. Instead, she was sick of the Times New Roman font and her brain. And citations. And ants. Oh God, was she sick of ants.
Besides five-year-olds with warty knees, and entomologists like herself, Greta didn’t know how many people examined ants. Butterflies had many fans. They were a pretty insect, easy to want to protect. People wanted to save Monarchs like they wanted to save elephants. They were majestic in a way that made you feel unimportant to be around them and important to protect them. It was like standing up for the pretty girl in class when she got a pimple, while the nerd cowered in the corner.
She didn’t pity ants, and she didn’t pity herself as the former nerd in the corner. Or current nerd in the corner, but research necessitated that. She could take care of herself, thank you very much. And so could the harvester ants; that’s what made trapping them somewhat difficult.
Even ninth-graders knew the scientific method, but it was odd to see it in action for research where she had no concept of the outcome. Most of her career, up to this point, she’d been replicating other people’s theories, but now she and Brandon walked on untrodden ground.
Make observations and form a hypothesis.
The ants hadn’t been there before the planting of the new palms last winter, and they’d arrived shortly afterward. They showed many hallmarks of an invasive species, including dominating food sources and reproducing quickly.
It had all started in March. Greta and Brandon on their knees, catching ants in Dixie cups, to look at under the microscope. She still remembered the way his hand hit hers on the concrete, the way the rubble left an imprint on the soft skin of her knees.
Develop testable questions and scenarios.
He brought his prototype, and she hers. One Sunday morning, two months ago, they set them up equidistant from the central action of the ants and their most serious nesting grounds. He opened a carafe of coffee he’d brought and poured her a cup, and they sat on the rocky center of the butterfly house near the waterfall. The butterflies looped around her, and he made a comment that she must have switched her perfume. The butterflies noticed. He did too. They watched ants make lazy trails below them for a few hours after dawn, talking like they used to.
Gather data and analyze.
After a day of activity, they corked and removed their prototypes, anesthetizing the tubes of ants with smoke, like is done to calm a hive of bees. She installed hinges in her bamboo version so she could open the door and peer inside. The whole contraption came up to her thigh and weighed about ten pounds. After a day, that weight had doubled. Insects only added weight in bulk, and as she guessed from trying to heft it, the inside teemed with ants. They crawled over each other in a red-brown mass so tight it looked like human hair. Brandon peered over her shoulder. “The hinge was smart,” he commented as he cut into his cube prototype with a saw. Hers was reusable and caught more ants. Another plus.
Replicate. Ad nauseum.
Science was repetition. She thought about Danny’s endless piano scales as a kid. Up, down, up, down, change keys, up, down. She used to needle him, “When are you going to play something real?” She understood now. The scales were real, they were the blocks, the data gathering.
After several rounds of removal, raw data showed a ninety-nine percent decrease of the population.
A ninety-nine percent increase in joking with Brandon. Some troublesome constants, like the gathering pictures of Eden on his desk. Like the gathering knot in her stomach as she realized that she might still have feelings for him.
And now she had to present her findings. Science couldn’t exist in a vacuum unless she worked with a Hadron Collider, and she had long ago ruled out physics. She liked things she could hold in her hand, manipulate. Now she knew more about harvester ants than anyone in the state.
She chewed over the best way to present the prototype visually, to explain how it worked, and ate a few bites of sandwich. The hum of the coffee shop played like music behind her, interrupted every few minutes by the squeak of a chair or a child’s cough. She was adding a caption to her 3D image when someone tapped her on the shoulder. In the tap, the quick press and release, she knew it was her twin behind her. Her shoulder as an oboe, her shoulder as a viola string. Plus, who
else would touch her in public? “You can sit for twenty minutes, but I can’t afford more distraction than that.”
“So generous,” Danny said. He sounded joyful, and she couldn’t resist pushing the issue.
“What? What are you so happy about?”
“I went into the music store,” Danny said.
The music store, the same one that twenty-some years ago they’d wandered in together and had been inspired to adopt a piano. “Did they recognize you?”
He nodded, then turned suddenly solemn. “I think I’ve lost my colors for good.”
“You never know,” Greta cut in. She didn’t want to waste their twenty minutes with self-pity. She suddenly felt guilty for rushing him. “I mean, why do you say that?”
“I thought maybe the store would trigger my synesthesia. Stupid, I guess.” He ate a potato chip off her plate, and she congratulated herself for not batting him away. “But nothing. I mean, the owner and I improvised a little, like we used to. He has this …”
And Danny descended into a stream of nonsense words about brands of piano and composers she had never heard of. Last year she would have cut him off. Now, she was grateful to see him there, hear him talking about things she didn’t care about. She thought about Max’s advice to be interested in other people and nodded at Danny, who took it as a cue to keep talking. Maybe she was developing some kind of patience and maturity.
Probably not.
“You take one more goddamn chip,” she muttered as he took a breath, “and I’m sending you an itemized bill.”
He swallowed and laughed at her.
The bell to the café tinkled. She saw the change in his face as he turned toward the door. She had the seat facing the back of the café and the restrooms, while he could look over at patrons ordering their frothy drinks. Something had changed. “What?”
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