“Your mom asked most of the questions,” I agreed.
“So, here’s my chance,” Ava said, but then the waiter came over and I managed to get a little more of a respite from what I expected would be an interrogation, kind of like what had happened at her cocktail party when her mom had wanted to hear every detail of my life, no matter how useless or boring.
To my happy surprise, she went another direction. She started talking about a wedding that she would have to attend for her cousin, and what she would wear. Apparently, the dress code was extremely restrictive, not just for the wedding party but also for guests.
“Demanding that we all wear jewel tones and then sending out hex color codes seems excessive to me,” she said. “It’s going to be hard to find something! What do you think?”
“I think that’s very weird, but I never understood trying to tell people what colors they can wear,” I answered. “Why wouldn’t you want guests to pick what they wanted, so they feel good about it?”
“I agree,” she said, “but I meant, what are you going to wear to the wedding?
“Me?”
“Won’t you and Levi be going together?”
“Me?” I repeated.
“Because he has that plus-one,” she said, and took a bite of salad. She then started to eat very fast. “I’m starving,” she mentioned. “I didn’t have time to grab anything before I volunteered at the camp, and then I had to get my tire fixed, and I had to pick up my dry cleaning so I would have something to wear to work. I changed in the back seat of the car.”
“It’s a good salad. What plus-one?”
He’d been invited when he was still with Mary Evelyn, she explained between forkfuls of lettuce. So Levi had RSVP-d “yes” for two guests, and that was what her aunt was expecting.
“He can just tell them how he broke up with that woman, so she won’t be attending,” I said.
“They already did the seating chart. Didn’t he talk to you about this? It’s our aunt Kellie’s daughter.” She raised her eyebrows when she spoke the last few words.
But I shook my head, since the name meant nothing to me.
“Aunt Kellie acts all holistic and wholesome, like she’s so serious about compost and she bakes her own dog treats, but she’s not really a nice person on the inside. She makes Levi feel terrible about his lack of progress.”
“I think he’s fine,” I defended him. “He has a job now and he’ll be renting his own apartment. He’s doesn’t do anything crazy, like carry a piece.”
“What?”
“He doesn’t have a gun,” I translated. I’d been up late the night before, watchingThe Maltese Falcon. “He’s not a criminal, that’s what I’m saying.”
“No, he’s not. She’s mean, though.”
“So he needs a stand-in for Mary Evelyn? To protect him from your aunt?”
“Not really to protect him,” Ava replied. “I just wanted a person to have his back. You know, if anyone said something nasty, his plus-one would tell him that it doesn’t matter.”
I also took a drink and captured a piece of ice, and I swished it around my mouth with my tongue. Levi had never seemed fragile, as if he needed protection. But Grant had always told me that I was bad at reading the room. Besides my clothing choices, it was another issue we’d had in our relationship.
“Why would you have talked about graduation?” he’d raged after I’d asked the girlfriend of one of his buddies why she hadn’t walked with the rest of her year. “She failed three classes this semester so she didn’t get her diploma. Nice to rub it in, Emerson.”
I had known that this particular girl had tutors for everything; the only reason I could imagine that she’d failed was that she hadn’t paid them, so they’d let her suffer the consequences. But even I had seen that she was very upset when I’d brought it up, and I certainly wouldn’t have mentioned it if I’d been told in advance that it was a sore subject. I’d apologized but Grant had considered that to be another symptom of a problem I had: my lack of understanding. I also hadn’t understood why he’d needed a jet ski or a two-hundred-dollar haircut, or his new car, either. After the accident, the vehicle had been declared a total loss.
Anyway, I was already aware that Levi had wanted to show Ava and the rest of his family that he wasn’t messing up, and that he was taking life seriously and was putting in effort. Maybe he would react badly if other relatives asked intrusive questions and mocked him. Maybe he would need someone there for him, andIcould be someone.
But one issue did loom large in my mind: “He didn’t ask me to go to this wedding with him,” I pointed out to his sister.
She brushed that aside. “I’m sure he isn’t even thinking about it yet. My husband has certainly forgotten, and the invitation has been tacked up on the bulletin board in our kitchen for months.”She grimaced. “When I remind Jeff about it, he’ll be so pissed. He can’t stand that branch of the family.”
I searched through my lettuce for more sunflower seeds and thought about their aunt Kellie making snide comments to Levi about his entry-level job or his borrowed apartment. I was sure that he was capable of dealing with her, but wouldn’t it have been better if he had a specific, designated companion, a person to be on his team? I made my decision. “If he asks me, I’ll go,” I stated.
“He will ask,” she assured me. “I’m so glad you’ll be there for him. One thing, though…uh, it’s black-tie.” She peered at me, but attire was the least of my problems.
