The Librarianist

A wish came to Bob, then, which was to view the receipts from the date of his wedding, July 12, 1959. He imagined the day would be bursting with ephemera but there was only one receipt he could find. It was pencil written, a shivery, all-caps printing, and it read: SUND x 3—VAN VAN CHOC. Below was the figure $2.75. Further down, in an upright cursive: Congradulations + good luck!!! (Your going to neeed it!!!) Bob puzzled over the stub, trying and failing to understand what purchase it was describing, even. Soon, and a picture took shape in his mind: he and Connie and Ethan were sitting at an otherwise empty soda fountain, each of them drinking a milkshake. Ten minutes before this, across the street and within the cool marble chambers of City Hall, Connie and Bob had been married, with Ethan standing by as best man. After the ceremony’s conclusion, the trio stood together on the sidewalk, shielding their eyes from the summer sun. Bob was thoroughly and completely satisfied. He was looking at his brand-new wife. “You’re Connie Comet,” he told her. She said, “It’s true, that’s who I am.” When Ethan asked, “Now what?” Connie’s arm came up level, and she pointed her bouquet at the soda fountain across the wide boulevard. They all three hooked arms and stepped off the curb; the street was clear but a car sped up to meet them, honking its horn as it approached. They achieved a group trot to push past the vehicle’s path, but then Connie broke free from the chain and spun about, lobbing the bouquet into the open window of the car as it blew past. The driver was a white-knuckling raver, a gargoyle of the highway; he received the bouquet on his lap as if it were a ticking bomb, and it was a joyful thing to watch the sedan sliding all across the road, eventually bending into a long, screeching right-hander, up a one-way street and out of sight.

The soda jerk was an old man, paper hat perched on his speckled head, nodding as the trio set themselves down on the red leather stools. He understood what they “meant”; it was not uncommon for newlyweds to visit him postceremony, he said. Connie asked if he could tell who the groom was and the man sized up Bob and Ethan and said that obviously it was Ethan. The little group laughed at this, and Bob laughed the hardest, hoping it was not too obvious that he’d been stung by the soda jerk’s mistake. The soda jerk was embarrassed; he patted Bob’s arm and told him, “He just has a sheen about him, but of course you’re the one, sure you are. You’ve got those haunted, I’ll-never-be-alone-again, let’s-share-everything-forever eyes.” He asked the group what they wanted and they ordered — vanilla, vanilla, chocolate.