Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood

Russians are unlike Americans in many of their customs. That is impulsive, yes. But this boy has fallen in love. I can tell you I have heard nothing else from him for months and months but Meg, Meg, Meg.”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter, really,” Meg said. “There’s nothing between us.” She turned to her father. “Seriously, think of how few people you meet who are instantly likable. Well? And these three, all of them—Lali is a magician.”
    We did not say that she, our daughter, found almost everybody likable.
    â€œAnd what about this farmer?” said Sam. “Hard to see how he got on the list.”
    â€œOh, just something silly. Something I was hearing when I went to see him,” said Lali. “It was merely a laugh. His way of laughing. A most sober man, as Meg will tell you.”
    â€œAnd I liked him,” said Meg.
    â€œI’m not sure you were in a position to know that ahead of time,” Sam said.
    â€œBut yet,” Lali spoke up, smiling away Sam’s remarks, “it is going to be Kevin, isn’t it? Many of the signs were in his favor.”
    Â 
    THE WEDDING WAS Small, in a room of an old mansion popular for weddings in our city. Lali and Stacey, Meg’s best friend,
were the attendants, and on the big round oak table we set out champagne glasses and cake. Meg was almost a vegan by this time and had not really wanted a cake, but her training as an anthropologist made her reluctant to leave it out. “Cake is sacred,” she said. “Pie is folkloric but cake is sacred.”
    â€œNo one’s advocating pie. But if you have cake at your wedding you want to be able to have a piece,” said Stacey.
    â€œAnd pie—why is that folkloric?” Sam wanted to know.
    â€œFour and twenty blackbirds, Daddy.”
    Really we were all afraid that Meg would take on the job herself and bake one of those dark, wet soy cakes. Stacey was afraid it wouldn’t taste good, but I was afraid it would sit there like an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual substitution. Kevin instead of the handsome prince. This was before we really knew Kevin and realized he was indeed the handsome prince and no substitute. By this time he did have a job, teaching English in a private school that didn’t require a teaching certificate.
    Two weeks before the wedding we found a bakery that could make a rich carrot cake that no one would guess had no eggs.
    Andrei crashed the wedding but Meg was able to keep things friendly. She sat with Andrei on the piano bench for a long time in her white dress with her long neck bent towards him, talking quietly, explaining, I believe, her love for the man to whom she had just finished vowing herself for life, until the pianist came and reached in from behind them to strike a loud chord. It was time for toasting and dancing to begin. The talk stopped and the chord pulsed through the crowd while Andrei pulled himself together, unclenched his fists, and agreed to leave the bench.
    How strange, it occurred to me as I watched Andrei during the toasts, that both of these men Lali had plucked out of nowhere for Meg had agreed, as if a spell had been laid on them, to be hers.

    Two years later Kevin had published his novel. Meg was happier than we had ever seen her. She was trying to get pregnant; she even had an anthropology course to teach, in addition to composition and The Power of Place, which had become permanently hers when Stacey got a better job. One day Kevin was standing in front of his high school juniors happily scanning “The Wanderer” when his aorta burst.
    In Marfan’s syndrome the aorta can be as weak and decayed as a strand of old kelp, and no one will suspect it.
    After he died Meg stopped going to work. She locked the door on the apartment where they had lived, without even cleaning it, let alone subletting it while there was no salary to pay for it, and came home. It may sound as