The Wedding People

Chapter 13

Phoebe drives fast, but not so fast that it would scare Juice. Juice seems to relax into the speed, reads something off her phone, and the silence is fine with Phoebe. A relief, really. Phoebe hates having to perform happiness in front of other people’s children. This is probably why Phoebe has been told many times that she is not particularly maternal, but she thinks what people mean by this is that she does not act like a mother on TV, who is often loud, always trying to hug someone, doesn’t really matter who.

But Phoebe is not a hugger. Her father was not a hugger. He gave a small pat on the back whenever he wanted to say “I love you.” He did not oohh and ahh over Phoebe, and so Phoebe did not oohh or ahh over other people’s children.

But this did not mean she didn’t enjoy kids. She just didn’t feel the need to try so hard with them, like her husband always did. She suspected kids didn’t really like it when adults tried too hard, mostly because Phoebe never liked that as a child. Then again, the first time her husband picked up Mia’s new baby, he swung her around like she was an airplane, and she seemed to really like it.

“Does she eat any real food yet?” he asked Mia.

It had been their last Thanksgiving together, three months before the affair started. Mia and Tom had come over with their new baby because Matt didn’t have a big family, either. The people at the university are my family, he always said. And that made sense for him. He was wedded to them for life.

“Today is going to be her first day of real food, actually,” Mia said.

“Wow,” Matt said. Phoebe’s husband looked genuinely thrilled by this, but Phoebe didn’t know how to look genuinely thrilled. She mostly just felt fat from her most recent IVF cycle. “She’s going to expect a Thanksgiving dinner every day from now on.”

“Right,” Mia said. “She’ll have the most complicated palate at preschool. Like, I’m sorry, but where is the turkey jus?”

They laughed, and even though the affair hadn’t started yet, Phoebe already felt outside of something they shared. They were different somehow—they were the ones making jokes over the turkey. They were the ones debating whether the Waldorf school would be good for the child, and Phoebe was the one just trying to hang on. Trying to smile. Phoebe was becoming like Tom. She looked to Tom in solidarity, but Tom was assessing the turkey.

“Are these the giblets?” Tom asked.

Phoebe felt like she was in a dream, watching Mia and her husband and the Waldorf Child continue on so merrily with Thanksgiving dinner. Tom asking why the turkey was flipped upside down, and Matt saying, “It’s the only way you can make it.”

Her husband was full of advice like that. He knew how to best do everything, and Tom seemed interested in being like this, too. Tom asked him a lot of questions while Mia had her breast out, and Phoebe didn’t remember if it was rude to look at the breast or rude not to look.

Phoebe tried to say something nice about the Waldorf Child. She imagined what some other woman would say. Another mother.

“Oh, how cute, look at those little killer whales on the baby’s onesie,” she said.

“I think we say orcas now,” Mia said.

And normally, Phoebe could have looked to her husband in this moment and laughed. I think we say orcas now, Phoebe imagined them saying. But nobody met her eye. She was left alone with her scolding. It was not a joke, just a fact. Parents say orcas, not killer whales. Ho hum. Then they ate the meal and she continued to notice how none of them really looked her in the eye. When they told stories, they bypassed Phoebe, as if she were not part of the conversation. Did it have something to do with her hair? It was a taupe wall that blended in with the taupe wall. The table roared. Her husband laughed, head back, and looked at the Waldorf Child with such tenderness. It occurred to her that if her husband didn’t leave her, she would probably have to leave him. Looking at him look at a child that way.

When they left, Phoebe didn’t feel relieved. She felt nervous, as if they took real life with them. The extra pie. The Waldorf Child. The whole life. She started to clean up, hoping it would return her to herself.

“I like children,” Phoebe said, and why did she feel the need to say this? “It’s just boring to make them the center of attention all the time. It’s like bringing a new toy to dinner and only looking at the new toy and only talking about the new toy and expecting everybody else to care about it.”

Her husband didn’t say anything at first. Just washed the turkey plate. “I thought it was fun.”

Was this the moment he fell out of love with her and in love with Mia? Was that what he was trying to tell her in the kitchen? Stop being so negative. Just be fun. Just say orcas.

It wasn’t until after Valentine’s Day when the actual affair began. But Phoebe knew something had shifted after Thanksgiving, because they stopped touching in the kitchen when they walked by each other. They stopped having sex, and Phoebe was scared by how easy it became to live without sex with her husband. She got spooked by the fact that she preferred some other version of her husband, the one she created in her fantasies. She thought of this husband when she masturbated in the mornings. She got lightheaded. She felt empty, but in a clean kind of way. Not having sex sometimes felt like giving up meat or pasta. Sometimes, she felt absurdly proud of herself.

But after three months of this, she sometimes missed her real husband so much, she walked over to him at the couch, kissed him on the mouth.

“It’s a simple prompt,” he said, while grading papers. It was February, only a few weeks into the spring semester, and he was already very annoyed by them. It wasn’t like him. “Analyze the crow metaphor. But they keep getting it wrong. They keep describing the crow as some harbinger of death, even though nothing about the passage suggests death. But they expect crows to be harbingers of death, so they can’t see that the author is trying to say something about how crows are actually very curious and social creatures! That’s what I want to write on their papers—Do you see the words on the page? Do you even know what a crow is?”

By lunch, her husband was still so angry about the crows that he had to take a break to eat lunch. Then he decided to go grade on campus because he had to finish up some committee work there. He and Mia had been tasked to pick the art for the humanities center hallway, and he needed to go look at the paintings that had been delivered.

Even though it was planned, it felt like a miracle seeing Mia in the hallway—that’s what he told Phoebe in their first conversation about the affair. He said he had been grading papers at home and feeling so depressed about everything—about his life, about their marriage, about his students and the crows—and when they were done talking about the paintings, he didn’t want to go home. He asked Mia if she wanted a drink, and Phoebe wonders if he said it the way he once said it to her—Hey, want a beer?

By then, it was whiskey, though. Her husband was off beer. He was a grown man, a professor, and drank amber liquids only while they talked about their lives—about Tom’s depression, about Phoebe’s depression, about how easy it was to become depressed by someone else’s depression. And then when the drink was over, it started to rain, which he said felt like a reason to stay put and have another, because neither of them wanted to walk across campus in the rain. And then her husband had the thought, What if I never have to go home again? It truly never occurred to him, but once it did, he couldn’t stop thinking it. He could just never go home. He could start a new life. Take the hands of the woman before him and say, “I love you.”

He said it just came out, like a sneeze he could not help. Once he said it, he understood it to be entirely true. He could see a whole future with Mia and the Waldorf Child. Mia said “I love you” back right away.

Neither of them knew it until that moment. He said that falling in love with Mia was like being a frog sitting in water that was slowly coming to a boil, and Phoebe said, “I take it that’s not the romantic metaphor you use when talking with her about it?” and he said, “I just mean it was slow, okay, so slow I didn’t realize it,” and she said, “But isn’t the frog in boiling water a myth? A frog wouldn’t jump out of boiling water, it would just die .” She was hoping he might riff on this with her, that together they would unpack the metaphor until it had no meaning.

“I love her,” he said again.

“You love that she has a baby,” Phoebe said.

“Not everything is about that, Phoebe.”

He said it wasn’t about sex, either, which he seemed to think would make her feel better but only made her feel worse. They had only slept together once before the pandemic started, and it had been a mistake. He should have waited, he knew. He should have talked to Phoebe about what he was feeling for Mia. But then it was the pandemic, and he didn’t know what to do. It was always Matt and Phoebe stuck in their home all summer, Mia and Tom in theirs. He thought he could wait until the pandemic was over, but at a certain point, lying to Phoebe made Matt feel too awful. Sneaking out to call Mia was just wrong. By the end of that summer, he knew he would have to make a decision about how he wanted to live. And so, in August, he did.

“She brought me to life again,” Matt told Phoebe. “I can’t help it. I need to see this through.”

For months after he left, it made her want to vomit thinking of another woman making her husband feel alive. Phoebe had been so jealous—but not just of Mia. Her husband felt alive again. She couldn’t even imagine it.

P HOEBE FEELS A tiny thrill as the car hugs the curve of the country. To feel alive on this beautiful road, to be at the border of sea and land. To be here, driving this beautiful car on this beautiful day.

“Lila is such a bitch,” Juice says.

Juice doesn’t say it until Phoebe starts looking for parking, as if Phoebe’s ability to ride in complete silence, her insistence on not making Juice talk, has impressed her into actual speech.

“Why do you say that?” Phoebe asks. She has long practiced this art of keeping an even tone with students, making her questions sound like statements.

“Aren’t you going to scold me for calling your best friend a bitch?” Juice asks.

“No,” Phoebe says.

Juice looks confused, as if she’s never met this kind of adult. The one who doesn’t give a shit. And this is one of the great things about not having kids, Phoebe realizes. She truly doesn’t have to give a shit. She doesn’t have to worry about Juice’s development and whether or not the phone is reprogramming her brain, even though of course it is. She is not Juice’s mother, not even a professor anymore, no longer standing in front of the classroom in a completely appropriate blouse and a skirt that shows a little knee, but of course not too much knee. She is free now in a way that people like Gary or Mia never will be. She can wear her skirt however high she wants. She can speak to Juice as if she’s just another person in the car, because that’s what she is.

“But I want to know why you would say that,” Phoebe says. “If you’re going to call someone a bitch, you should have a pretty good reason.”

“Honestly, I bet she was just born that way.”

“So like one of those babies that emerges from the womb as a total bitch?”

“Exactly,” Juice says.

“Lila slid out, and the doctors were like, Congratulations, Mom and Dad, it’s… a bitch!”

“Yes!” Juice laughs. Once she gets the joke, she can’t stop. “Surprise! It’s a giant bitch!”

“Would you like to swaddle your giant bitch?” Phoebe asks, and this sends Juice over the edge.

They get out of the car. They walk down Bellevue Avenue and Juice stops in front of an art gallery.

“Ugh,” she says. “I wish my dad never walked into this gallery.”

The Winthrop Gallery of International Art. The door is locked, the lights are off, but through the window, Phoebe can see big canvasses and shiny frames in the dark. She tries to imagine Gary walking in there, Lila at the desk.

“Wait, is that a Hudson River School painting?” Phoebe asks.

Juice shrugs. “What’s a Hudson River School?”

They enter the boutique next door because Phoebe spots shoes against the back wall.

“I seriously don’t get it,” Juice says. “I already have shoes!”

Phoebe looks at Juice’s combat boots. “Not open-toed ones.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Boots don’t reveal your toes.”

“Yeah, because my toes are actually kind of private .”

“Not for much longer, I’m afraid,” Phoebe says. “At this wedding, there are public toes only.”

“Has anyone ever asked themselves… why? Why do we want to see other people’s toes so much?”

“Juice,” Phoebe says. “Let me make your life a lot simpler. You always need the shoes that the bride wants you to have.”

“But why? I’m tired of doing everything she wants.”

“It’s just one of those rules.”

“One of what rules?”

“Like, nobody can make fun of your father but you. Don’t eat a giant cake before running. And always buy the shoes that the bride wants you to buy.”

Juice looks impressed. “What other rules do you know?”

“Too many,” Phoebe says.

P HOEBE HELPS J UICE pick out gold shoes that she doesn’t completely hate more than life itself, and Phoebe gets a black pair for herself. She tries them on and they look so good, she feels proud of her feet.

“What do you think?” Phoebe asks, stretching out her leg.

“It looks like a foot,” Juice says. “With a shoe on it.”

“But do you like it?”

“You sound like Lila,” Juice says. “Lila’s obsessed with her feet.”

“What do you mean, she’s obsessed with her feet?”

“During the pandemic she spent hours watching TV and soaking her feet in this pedicure machine she bought. And it was my pedicure machine. I mean, she gave it to me for my birthday. And she was like, Yeah, but you never use it. And I was like, Well yeah, why would I use that? I mean, who cares what someone’s feet look like? It’s like she has no idea that we’re all just going to die someday.”

Juice leans over to unbuckle her shoe.

“Is that what you said?” Phoebe asks.

“Once,” Juice says.

“Harsh.”

“Well, it’s not normal. She’s obsessed with the way she looks. It literally takes her hours to figure out what to wear… to the bathroom. It’s such a waste of time.”

It’s a similar kind of thing Phoebe used to tell herself in graduate school when everybody showed up to class looking like they had spent all morning turning themselves into a postmodern painting. It made her feel better about just wearing jeans. But Phoebe no longer believes this is the whole truth.

“A woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself,” Phoebe says. “It’s a line from an Edith Wharton novel.”

A line that struck Phoebe as very true, even though her students always thought it sounded shallow. So does Juice.

“Well, that’s just sad,” Juice says. “You shouldn’t ask someone out because of their clothes.”

“I think Wharton meant something more than that,” Phoebe says. “I think she wants us to think about the secret things people reveal through their clothing choices. Like when we admire someone’s dress or jacket, we’re really admiring something else.”

“Like their body?” Juice asks. “Like how much money they have?”

And yes, yes. But no.

“Clearly you’ve never fallen in love with a man because he wore the same leather belt every day,” Phoebe says.

Juice laughs. “Wait, you fell in love with a man because of his belt?”

“My ex-husband wore it on our first date,” Phoebe says. “I remember admiring how the leather was smooth and tan, and then I kept noticing him wear it again and again.”

It was a good belt, Matt told her when she finally asked about it, said he bought it when he was eighteen, and that he hoped to keep it until he died. And she could see it all, how this man would care for this one belt his whole life, how he would walk the perimeter of their house each night, making sure the doors were locked and the cups were in perfect order in the cabinet.

“Did he?” Juice asks.

“Yes,” Phoebe says.

“Then why aren’t you still married?”

“He had an affair.”

“Oh. Like Albert Schuyler?”

“Like Albert Schuyler.”

“Did he build his mistress a building, too?”

Phoebe chuckles. It feels good to finally laugh about it for real.

“Not quite,” she says.

“So you were wrong about the belt,” Juice says. “He didn’t take care of you forever.”

“No,” Phoebe says. “But I was not wrong about the belt.”

Phoebe remembers the last night she spent with her husband, watching him undress for bed, rolling up the belt into a little ball. Here was a man who took care of everything, she thought. A man who folded his laundry with the precision of a dressmaker. So why couldn’t he take care of this, too? Why did she believe that somehow he could always save her, like her womb was a cupboard with cups in all the wrong places? A place her husband would rearrange, if only he could get to it.

“The belt revealed what we both wanted him to be,” Phoebe says. “But we can’t always be what we want every second. And that’s okay. That’s just life, you know?”

Juice picks up her boots and stares at them like they look different to her now.

“What do you want your boots to say about you?” Phoebe asks.

When Juice doesn’t say anything, Phoebe worries she’s lost her, that this might be too much for the kid, the way she used to worry about losing her students when they fell silent in class. Because their silence during the pandemic was excruciating. Their silence sounded like proof that they hated her, proof that they couldn’t wait to leave, too.

But Phoebe had not always felt that way about teaching. When she first started, she loved it so much, she often felt bad for the parents of her students who didn’t get to know their children in the way Phoebe sometimes did. Because a professor was in a unique position to open students up. They seemed inclined to trust that when Phoebe asked a question, it was leading somewhere worthwhile. It was nice, Phoebe thought, how often they went with her. How they trusted her to be a good professor, and she trusted them to be good students who sat in silence not because they hated her but because they were thinking.

So she decides to trust in Juice’s silence. She does not retract her question or apologize for it. She just waits, until finally, Juice speaks.

“I guess I want people to know that I don’t care what my feet look like,” Juice says. “That I’m not like Lila at all.”

“What are you like?”

“Like my mom.”

“What was she like?”

“Really fun,” Juice says. “We used to paint a lot together. She used to let me use my hands and feet and walk all over the canvas like a monkey. And once we all built this mini-sculpture of our house out of pancakes. And after we ate it all, my mom was like, Uh-oh, where are we going to live? We laughed so hard. And sometimes I feel like my dad doesn’t even remember that day. It’s like he’s totally forgotten her.”

“He hasn’t forgotten her,” Phoebe says. “Trust me.”

“But how do you know?”

“Because he talked to me about her just this morning.”

“Really?” Juice says.

“Really,” Phoebe says. “And you can tell your dad these things, you know. You don’t have to rely on your boots to do all the talking for you.”

“Well, that’s good,” Juice says. “Because they’re actually getting kind of sweaty. It’s really hot out.”

Phoebe laughs, picks a pair of Tevas off the shelf, and holds them up. “What about these?”

A T THE OTHER boutiques, Phoebe tries on dresses that hug her body. She stands in the three-way mirror of the dressing room and admires herself in a plum-colored floor-length dress. It feels good to be wearing a form-fitting dress, to see the outline of her body again.

“What do you think?” Phoebe asks Juice. She steps out of the dressing room.

“I don’t know why you keep asking me that,” Juice says. “I don’t know what looks good on people.”

Phoebe can feel Juice’s embarrassment at being asked. She can feel it because Phoebe used to be embarrassed like that. That’s why Phoebe was a terrible shopper—always too burdened by thoughts of future embarrassment, so she never bought anything that could potentially be considered excessive, like a dress with puffed sleeves or three drinks at a bar.

“First gut reaction.”

“You look like Miss Scarlet from Clue, ” Juice says.

“Is Miss Scarlet hot?”

Juice laughs. “Oh my God, nobody from Clue is hot. That’s so not what Clue is about, Phoebe.”

Phoebe laughs. It feels good to hear Juice say her name.

“I’m buying it,” Phoebe says.

It’s an epic shopping trip. Phoebe needs practically everything. Before they are done, Phoebe has picked up five other dresses, new clothes for the week, makeup, two bathing suits, and anything else she thinks she might need while here, including a comically large sun hat that seems more like something the wedding people would wear.

“This hat should have its own police escort,” Phoebe says to Juice, but Juice is by the register now and only the woman behind the desk hears her.

“You picked the prettiest one in the store,” she says.

Phoebe feels guilty, because picking it up had only been a joke. The clerk stares at her with such admiring eyes, until Phoebe feels pressured into purchasing it, and outside the store, when Phoebe puts on the giant sun hat, Juice says, “Oh my God. It’s so big. It’s so embarrassing.”

But Juice says it with a smile, like now, in the anonymity of the street, now with Phoebe’s guidance, it’s good to be so embarrassing. It’s funny. People on the street step out of the way to avoid brushing Phoebe’s brim with their shoulders, and when they do, Juice and Phoebe look at each other and crack up.

“Make way!” Phoebe shouts, and they walk down the cobblestone.

“Clear the streets!” Juice yells.

When it begins to rain, Phoebe says, “Look, we don’t even need an umbrella. You can just get under the hat.”

Phoebe pulls her in close.

“I’d never carry an umbrella anyway,” Juice says.

“Why not?”

“It’s so embarrassing.”

“To carry an umbrella?”

“It’s… humiliating.”

Phoebe is fascinated by Juice’s relentless embarrassment. Phoebe wants to know everything about it, study it like a book. She is used to being around college students who are usually a bit more okay being embarrassed.

“It’s humiliating to not be rained on?”

“It’s humiliating to be so… prepared.”

After, they buy lunch from a café that asks if they want collagen shots in their lattes. Phoebe likes the way the barista talks, how her voice is much louder than she expects it to be. Phoebe takes a sip of the warm coffee, and as they pass the art gallery on the way to the car, Phoebe can feel Juice’s sourness return.

“I seriously just don’t get why anybody cares about their car,” Juice says, opening the car door. “It’s just a hunk of metal.”

“Some people might say that your dog was just a piece of plastic,” Phoebe says.

“It’s different.”

“You’re right. It is different,” Phoebe says, “because you loved that piece of plastic.”

“Yeah, fine, I loved a piece of plastic. So what!”

“Exactly!” Phoebe says. “So what? Love your piece of plastic. And let other people love their hunk of metal.”

“Fine,” Juice says, but she does not sound satisfied. Phoebe is not letting her do the one thing she wants to do, which is talk shit about her future stepmother.

“But I can’t really talk about my mom with my dad,” Juice says. “Because Lila is always there. And Lila won’t let us.”

“Has she ever told you not to talk about her?”

“She just gets this look on her face. And it’s like we all know that if we talk about her she’s going to get upset.”

“She probably will get upset.”

“But why? She’s my mom . And when Lila gets upset, it’s like all of a sudden, I’m not allowed to have a mom anymore. We have to pretend she never existed. My dad does, too. He’s so weird around her. Like she’s this queen or something. He’ll like, put out a glass of white wine when she gets out of the shower, like her shower was oh so traumatic.”

“That’s actually nice.”

“He never did that stuff with my mom.”

“Maybe he became nicer after she died.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Clearly not,” Phoebe says, and Juice laughs.

“I want to be nice,” Juice says. “It’s just that we have nothing in common.”

“You both enjoy air. And food.”

“Okay, yeah fine, we both like breathing. But we don’t have anything important in common.”

“You’re right. Air is so not important.”

“Who needs air? I, personally, hate air.”

Phoebe puts the keys in the ignition.

“I mean, I guess we both love all things Disney,” Juice says.

“That’s something,” Phoebe says, and starts the car. “That’s something.”

For the rest of the ride, Juice asks to be quizzed on the things she knows, like the country’s capitals. She has a test next week. But she also just thinks it’s fun. She likes maps. She likes knowing where things are. She likes using Waze and pointing out things on the street, like the most impressive mansions. They drive out of the historic district, and Phoebe looks for a parking space that’s not right in front of the sex shop. She parks two stores down in front of an animal shelter.

“Oh my God, it’s fate,” Juice says. “Can I get a dog?”

“That’s a question for your father,” Phoebe says.

“But he always says no. Lila hates dogs.”

“Nobody hates dogs.”

“I just want to go look.”

“Trust me, there’s no just looking when you’re at a shelter,” Phoebe says.

“But I’m ready for more than a piece of plastic.”

“Okay, fine. You have ten minutes to go adore nonplastic animals.”

“Aren’t you coming with me?”

Phoebe is not ready for it, can’t bear to see all those little animals with their noses pressed against the cages.

“I need to run this last errand. I’ll meet you back at the car.”

Juice claps her hands and goes alone into the shelter, while Phoebe looks down at her phone. She finally listens to the voicemail from her husband.

I don’t know what you know about Harry, or where you are, but I thought I should tell you that I buried him in the backyard. Please call me back, Phoebe.

His voice—it sounds just like him, though she doesn’t know why this should be surprising. It makes her cry, thinking of her husband getting the shovel, probably her father’s old one that she keeps in the garage. She wonders where he buried him. By the stone near the pine?

But she doesn’t call him back. She has no responsibility to make her husband feel better about anything at this point. He is her ex-husband, she repeats. Ex-husband. And she is a maid of honor. She wipes her tears, drops her phone into the purse, and walks into the sex shop.

P HOEBE HAS PASSED sex shops hundreds of times on the St. Louis highways but has never actually stopped in one. It never even occurred to her to enter, the way it never occurred to her to stop at a church. She was a married woman who never watched porn, never orgasmed theatrically, never saw a need for props. She didn’t like anything too weird, she told Matt.

So she is surprised by how not weird it is inside, set up like any other store, except where the blouses should be, there are silicone vaginas. Chains on the wall. Panties everywhere.

“Can I help you?” the saleswoman asks.

“I’m looking for dick-themed flatware,” Phoebe says, slightly embarrassed at first. It helps that the saleswoman is not. She looks as bored as she might working at Kohl’s.

“We have straws shaped liked dicks,” the woman says. “And those silicone vaginas that I guess you could like, use as a bowl or something?”

“Are the dick straws compostable?” Phoebe asks.

“No. But I think they’re recyclable.”

“I need compostable.”

“The only thing we have that is close to being compostable is the edible underwear in the back. I mean, assuming you eat it all. Zero waste.”

The whole exchange is so businesslike, Phoebe wishes she could go back and speak the same way when in bed with her husband. She wishes she could have had the courage to ask for what she wanted, even if it sounded weird. Because she is starting to suspect that she actually likes weird things. That everybody likes weird things, which is why sex shops are open in the middle of a Thursday afternoon.

She picks up the plastic penis straws and wonders if with Mia, for whatever reason, Matt can be weird. If that is why he needs her. If that is what made him feel alive again. And for the first time, the thought doesn’t fill her with horror but with hope. Maybe one day she will find someone and together they will be weird.

She pays for the penis straws, as well as a few strappy red thongs simply because she imagines it’s impossible not to feel sexy while wearing them.

O UTSIDE , J UICE IS not in the car. Phoebe pauses in front of the shelter, looks through the window to see Juice on a chair holding a small yellow dog. Juice looks so happy, and Phoebe decides to go in. She wants to be a part of it. It’s okay, the therapist said, to want to be a part of it.

“Oh my God, Phoebe, you should come hold him!” Juice says.

So Phoebe picks up the dog. Feels the animal’s soft fluffy paws. “What’s your name?”

“Unfortunately, it’s Frank,” Juice says. “But you can change that, right?”

“Me?” Phoebe asks like this is crazy, even though she can already imagine it. This is Frank, her new dog. They’ll go on long walks together. They’ll go clamming in the mornings when nobody is awake. “I can’t buy a dog. The hotel doesn’t allow them.”

“Well, someone has to buy Frank,” Juice says. She points to a smaller beagle in a cage. “I’ve already decided I’m going to get that one.”

The entire ride home, Juice tries to come up with new names for Phoebe’s dog. But when they walk back into the hotel, Phoebe breaks the news.

“I don’t know, Juice,” she says. “I think I like the name Frank.”