Love Letters of the Angels of Death by Jennifer Quist

Author:Jennifer Quist [Quist, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781927535158
Publisher: Linda Leith Publishing
Published: 2013-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

Your cousin Janae’s wedding was one of those lavish pink fantasy weddings, the kind mothers insist on for daughters who get married right out of high school just in case the brides never accomplish anything else worth a big party during the rest of their lives. You’re well out of high school but still single when Janae marries that guy even though he’s so much older than her. Word in the family is that you’ve read something in one of your university textbooks about destructive power imbalances between spouses with wide gaps between their ages. But the family agrees all that intellectual mumbo-jumbo of yours is just a smoke screen to hide the fact that you’re lovelorn, at age twenty.

Janae punishes you for their talk by not inviting you to stand beside her at the wedding reception wearing a pale pink satin dress that will look like it’s made of tin foil in all the flash photography. So here you are, playing the Cinderella of the wedding. You’re too estranged from the bride to be an overdressed member of the wedding party with a free manicure and a new pair of shoes. But you’re still close enough to her to work until after midnight tacking pink streamers to the walls of the church hall.

When the glass bowls of pink lemonade punch are full and the trays of after-dinner sweets are piled high enough, you drift away from the wedding reception and onto the burgundy sofa in the foyer outside the hall. This foyer is where we meet.

The first time I see you, the front of your plain black dress is wet across the middle from the time you’ve spent leaning against the sink, washing the dishes from Janae’s “head table” – the only table not set with paper plates. Your black shoes are just like the ones china dolls wear right out of their boxes – round-toed, flat-heeled, with one strap slung across the top of the foot and buckled on the other side.

“Just call them ‘Mary Janes,’” you’ll tell me much later, when I’m your husband and I miss those shoes and I’m trying to tell you how much I liked them.

At Janae’s wedding reception, your Mary Janes lay about a metre apart on the floor of the church foyer. You kicked them off without undoing the buckles before you sat down and pulled your sore feet up underneath yourself. That friend of yours is with you – the girl you share an apartment with during university. Right now, she’s better than a sister to you.

“Look at how wet you got in there. You should have let me wash and you could have dried for a while,” she chides you.

You just shrug. “Then we’d both be soggy. And there’s no point in that.”

Your friend is a wholesome, kind, and pretty girl. You’re right to love her the way you do. And even though it’s almost more embarrassing than I can stand, your nice roommate is the reason I’ve come here tonight.

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