Chapter 23: The Registry Again

I said yes on the roof.

Then I said it again at the long table, because Wilda made me, so the brides could hear.

The lynx-kin girl screamed so loud the laundromat man came over to check on us.

We picked a Tuesday.

It had to be a Tuesday.

On September first, the three brides were waiting on the Registry steps when the brass doors opened at nine.

The bear-kin woman filed first.

The clerk took her form, stamped it, and read out the new line at the top in a voice that shook a little.

"Dissolution for neglect of Heat. Granted."

The bear-kin woman didn't cry.

She went outside, sat down on the top step in the sun, and ate an entire cardamom bun very slowly with her eyes shut.

The wolf-kin bride filed second, with half her pack in the hall behind her.

The lynx-kin girl filed third and did a cartwheel on Wharf Street in front of a bus.

Two weeks later, on a Tuesday night in September, I walked into the old customs house at one in the morning.

Not in slippers.

In my good boots and the red scarf the bear-kin woman had knitted me, with Orrin beside me and the brides and Wilda behind us.

The night desk was in the same place.

The same scuffed counter, the same water cooler, the same rack of pamphlets.

The blue ones with the sunset were gone.

Somebody had put up a new rack with one plain white card in it, and the card said YOU CAN FILE TONIGHT.

Behind the desk sat the bear-kin woman, in a volunteer badge.

She'd signed up the week her dissolution came through.

"Evening," she said, as if she'd never seen us before. "What can I do for you?"

"We'd like to register a bond," I said.

"Have a seat."

I sat down in the chair.

It was the same chair.

I could tell because the left leg still knocked when I moved, the way it had when my tail was hitting it on the worst night of my life.

My tail was very still now.

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