and mustache were tinged with gray. His bride-to-be, however, couldn’t have been more than sixteenyears old. She was big-eyed and bony except for her belly, which was swollen with pregnancy. The girlnodded at Mimi, who was standing up while holding onto Lily’s knee. “How old?” the girl asked.
“Thirteen months,” Lily said. “She’s working on learning how to walk.”
“She’s pretty,” the girl said, with a wistful smile on her face. “I can’t wait til my baby comes, so Ican play with him.”
Lily smiled at the girl, but looking at her made her sad — this little girl who was going to playwith her baby like a new doll. Lily couldn’t even look at the grown man who had taken his bride’sgirlhood away.
Finally the clerk returned with Ben and Lily’s paperwork. “There ya go,” she said brightly, “andcongratulations.”
Lily was exhausted from hauling Mimi around. “So, where do we go to get this thing over with?”
“Over to the City Drug,” Ben said. “The pharmacist there’s the justice of the peace.”
Lily followed him down the stairs. “We’re getting married in a drug store?”
“Yup.”
“Well, it’s handy, I guess. We can get married and buy condoms for our wedding night in the sameconvenient location.”
Ben stumbled on the stairs, steadied himself on the railing, and looked back at Lily with anexpression of animal terror.
“I was joking! God.”
The old lady in the half-glasses at the City Drug eyed Ben. “You’re Big Ben McGilly’s boy,ain’tcha?”
“Yes. Ma’am, and we’re here to get married.”
“A McGilly getting married in the City Drug? I’ve never heard the like! Why, when your littlebrother got married, they had it over at the country club. I heard tell they floated candles and flowers inthat pond out by the golf course —”
“I know,” Ben said impatiently. “I was there. The thing is, we’re in kind of a hurry.”
The woman looked Lily up and down. “I don’t see why. She ain’t showing yet. And that littlegirl’s just about big enough to be a flower girl.” When neither Lily nor Ben responded, she shrugged andhollered, “Frank! Wedding!”
“Bring ’em on back,” a gruff voice called from the back of the store.
Frank was a paunchy, middle-aged guy in a too-tight pharmacist’s smock. “Y’all got yourlicense?” Ben presented the paperwork, and Frank glanced over it disinterestedly. “All right, then. Let’sget started. Doris, you wanna witness?”
Doris, the lady in the half-glasses, presented Lily with a bouquet of red plastic carnations — thekind that would decorate graves in a cemetery near a trailer park. “A bride needs a bouquet,” the old lady