Curtis said that he wanted to marry. His desire did not seem completely sincere, but under the circumstances Mary wondered how it could have been. In any event, it seemed to Mary that they should at least try. It surprised them both how easy this was to do-no blood tests, just a few papers to sign. Curtis made the necessary phone calls, and on a Tuesday they drove to city hall in Minneapolis and got in line. After, Mary planned to call her parents, and then the two of them would drive back to Twig; she would work in the bar that night, and Curtis would get back to painting.

Curtis dressed in a dark suit-coat and jeans, and Mary wore the blue wool dress she had worn beneath her choir robe in college. She had no flowers, though many of the other women in the waiting room were clutching small bouquets at their waists. Each couple had a number, and every few minutes a clerk with a clipboard would appear through a door behind the desk to call the next couple in to take their vows.

“This is crazy,” Curtis said.

“It isn’t exactly what I planned for my life either,” Mary said. She was holding their number, thirty-six. The couple they had just called was number thirty-two. “On the other hand, it seems I’ve planned very little.”

Curtis looked like he was about to cry.

“I can’t,” he said helplessly. “Not to either one of us.”

Mary took his hand, threading their fingers together. “I know,” she said.

They left the building and returned to the car. “Don’t do it,” Curtis said, his knuckles white on the wheel.

“Don’t?”

Curtis took a deep breath. “I don’t… believe in it,” he said.

“No one does,” Mary said.

They drove out of the city and stopped at an Ember’s for lunch. Her circumstances made it difficult for Mary to know what to order; already the hunger had begun, a force like possession, and yet she now knew this would come to nothing.

“I’ll go with you,” Curtis said finally.

“Who’s asking?” Mary said.

The clinic was in St. Paul -a small white house on a residential street with baby strollers left on the porches and brightly colored plastic toys strewn in the yards. Mary parked her car and walked around the block twice before stepping onto the porch. Inside, a dozen women sat on plastic chairs. Some were very young, and had brought their mothers with them. Seeing these women, Mary wished she could have, too, but of course this was impossible-her mother was, after all, adopted, and under different circumstances, might not have been born at all. Mary gave her name at the desk.

“Where are the demonstrators?” she asked. On a stool by the front door Mary had seen a pile of leaflets, weighted down with a stone.

The woman looked at the clock on the wall, then back at Mary. She was spooning yogurt from a cup and had tucked a pencil behind one ear. “I think he usually goes to lunch at one o’clock.”

Someone, a nurse or doctor, examined Mary and told her to come back in two weeks. This seemed like a long time, but Mary didn’t see how she was in a position to argue. Outside, a single demonstrator patrolled the sidewalk, a bald man wearing a sandwich board and mittens. One eye looked at her, while the other did not; the second one was glass.

“This isn’t the answer,” he pleaded.

“Fuck you,” Mary said.

Spring came early to Twig, and the next two weeks brought storm after storm to the little town. Mary moved back into her old bedroom, with its window looking out over the street above the shoe store and its sign, a single boot with an upswept toe, creaking in the spring wind. It was clear that things were over with Curtis-that, when the time came, they would not emerge together on the far side-but in these two weeks of wind and rain, they became a couple again, in a way they had never been before. They were tender and affectionate with one another, and when she came home each night from the Norway, Curtis made her something to eat and then said good-night to her at the door of her bedroom, as if they lived in different towns.

On the eleventh day, a Saturday, Mary returned from the Laundromat and found Curtis sitting on the sofa, clutching his eye. She thought he might be crying, but when he pulled his hand away she saw the green-and-purple bruise, and the cut along the ridge of his cheekbone, a line of blood dried black. The eye itself was uninjured.

She sat beside him and touched his cheek with the tips of her fingers. “What happened?”

“Russell did it,” Curtis said.

Mary tried to imagine this but couldn’t. She wrapped some ice cubes in a warm dish towel from the laundry basket and held it to his eye. “I didn’t know he knew how to hit. Where was this? Outside somewhere? Or here in the apartment?”

Russell had hit him with his radio. Mary folded the laundry while Curtis iced his eye. Their things were still mixed together, and she sorted them into separate piles of neatly folded clothes on the old trunk they used as a coffee table. She had always done it this way, but as these piles accumulated, they became something more.

“I thought I’d go back home,” Curtis said.

“That’s probably best,” Mary heard herself say. “I’m sorry, but could you please do it now?”

In the morning he was gone, and two days later Mary drove herself to the clinic. How terrible, she thought, to be twenty-two, and already have the worst thing of her life to remember. Then she imagined a strongbox, like a small safe, and she took this idea and placed it in the box. Afterward, she rested an hour on a cot, drank the juice and nibbled the cookies they gave her, and then got back into the Citation. They had told her not to drive after the abortion, but no one actually checked on this, and she drove halfway to Twig before she stopped to vomit in a field of broken corn.

She managed to drive the rest of the way home, climb the stairs to the apartment, and collapse on the couch. They had told her not to take aspirin-it thinned the blood-but that was all she had, so she took two and wrapped herself in a blanket. She drifted in and out of an unhappy sleep. Late in the afternoon Russell came home from the bakery, his hair and hands dusted with flour. She hadn’t told him that today was the day, and now she saw she should have. He brought her a tray of tea and cinnamon toast, and sat on the couch near her feet.

“I’m sorry, that’s all I know how to make.”

“It’s perfect,” Mary said, chewing her toast. “I didn’t know how hungry I was.”

Russell looked at the floor with desolate eyes. “Oh, he’s an asshole.”

“I don’t know if he is.”

That evening a gusty wind tossed the bare branches about. Mary lay on the sofa and listened to the storm approach. It seemed at first to be very far away, and then was suddenly upon them. At the same moment that the sky turned yellow, they heard the tornado sirens; the heavens opened, and hail began to pelt the windows, a sound like pennies falling.

“Check the TV,” Mary said from the couch.

“There’s no time.” Russell lifted her off the sofa and carried her in his arms down the stairs. A green haze had descended over the street, and the wind had ceased, freezing the scene in its abandonment-a bad sign, as Mary knew. Hailstones were scattered over the sidewalk, some as large as marbles, mixed with old leaves and twigs that the wind had torn from the trees. Cars were parked at haphazard angles; their drivers had dashed inside.

“What now, my hero?” said Mary.

He carried her around the building to the gravel alleyway, down a flight of concrete steps, and into the dim basement. There Russell placed her, still wrapped in her blanket, on the floor by the water heater. The wind resumed, the lights went out, the heavens shook with thunder. Russell lay beside her on the damp floor and kissed her.

“Your beard tickles,” Mary said.