“I’ll stay here,” I said. My feet needed a break and my hip was starting to bother me. I tried his spot, leaning against the wall, and another woman leaned next to me. It turned out that she was one of the groom’s cousins who’d also been forced by her parents to stay and show support. Then she told me the story of her boyfriend, her escort to this event whom she’d been dating for five years.
“I was talking about marriage and children, and how we could start to save for a wedding and a house,” she said. “I have a lot put away for our future and I knew he was saving, too. And then do you know what he did?”
I shook my head. There were a lot of possibilities but from the look on her face, I could tell that “he bought a ring and got down on one knee” was not one of them.
She mirrored me by shaking her head back. “He went and got a Cobra!”
When I listened to strangers’ information dumps, I usually tried to refrain from making judgements. But this time, I felt I had to speak up. “That’s so dangerous!” I told her. “I hope you’re not living together and you don’t have to be around it.”
She stared at me for a moment and then said, “Oh, no. I meant a car. A Shelby Cobra.” My confusion didn’t slow the story much and she told me all about this old-fashioned race car that was, in her case, the end of her dreams. “He wouldn’t have poured out everything in his bank account into a two-seater where you could never, ever install a car seat if he was seriously thinking about a future with me.”
She mentioned the amount he’d spent and again, I shook my head. Grant’s friends usually didn’t talk about how much things cost, because they never really noticed—for people who had a lot of money and had grown up with the sky as the limit on spending, price tags were meaningless. As someone who hadn’t grown up like that, I’d researched the costs of their new cars, remodeled kitchens, and vacation homes, and I’d wondered howit felt not to worry. They’d seemed to be unsatisfied in spite of it all.
As she told me about the trip he’d taken to the Bahamas with his friends (leaving her on read and with his location turned off), I glanced around, wondering where Levi had gone. Guests had been steadily streaming through the exit and the skeleton crew of catering staff had already started their breakdown. In not too long, the woman talking to me was interrupted by her boyfriend, who was also ready to go. She said a quick goodbye and took off without looking back, which I’d expected. She wasn’t going to want to see me again after admitting that her heart had been broken by the man she was leaving with.
Finally, Levi reappeared. “Sorry,” he told me. “My mom was stuck trying to comfort Aunt Kellie, who’s so upset that she even hugged me and thanked me for coming. Then she went to deal with Britainy and my mom told me that this shit has only gotten worse. My cousin just locked herself in the only women’s bathroom and there are a ton of people who need to use the facilities.”
“What about the men’s room?” I suggested.
“The groom is in there throwing up. Everywhere,” he said, grimacing. “Sounds like the beginning of a successful marriage. Let’s go.”
“Your mom doesn’t want us to stay?”
“Aves and Liv are already gone. They pretended they had babysitter problems but I know it’s because they were hungry.”
“I am, too,” I admitted. “Let’s stop on the way home, because I need something to absorb all the liquor. And I want to go to a bathroom where there’s no petulant bride or puking groom.”
He laughed. “We’re out, milady.”
We stopped at a Coney Island and it had two functioning bathrooms that were wonderful. It was a little hard to fit in the stall in my dress but I’d gotten used to functioning in fancy clothes as the years had passed. The wobbling I was doing in my shoes wasn’t totally due to their height or my bad hip, but because I’d really had too much to drink.
I announced that to Levi when I got back to our booth. “I had too much to drink.” Then my heart leapt in happiness when I saw what was on the table. “You already got french fries? Thank you!”
“I asked for an order, stat,” Levi said. “You look a little…well, when my grandpa had a lot of bourbon, he used to say he was riding full choke. It’s a motorcycle thing,” he explained.
“I know that he used to have one of those. Ava told me on the day I met her.”
“How do you remember that?” he asked.
“Because I have it on file,” I said. “I write down as much as I can remember about my conversations and interactions with people. I actually do a lot of speech to text, which is a lot easier than typing. I have transcripts and I review them.”
“What the hell?” he asked, not mad but confused.
“A lot times people go back on what they say. They’ll tell you something but later it might turn out to be a lie, or they’ll claim that they never said anything like that at all,” I explained. I took four or five, or maybe ten more fries. “These are delicious.”
“So you write everything down because you want proof? You have some ketchup there.” He reached across the table and wiped the corner of my mouth.
“Thank you. Yes, it’s so that I know I’m not crazy and that it all really happened.”
“Who told you that you were crazy?” he asked, but first we ordered. We both ordered a lot. Unfortunately, the plate was empty of french fries but the waitress promised that the rest would come quickly.
Levi repeated the question when she was gone. “When I was little, I always had problems with my mother about information. Not that she said I was crazy, but she made me doubt myself so much,” I replied. She had told me that we were going to move to Paris, which was where I first got the idea about living in an apartment with a terrace. She’d told me that I was going to spend the summer with my father while she traveled in South America, that we were going to get a new car, that she was going to win a prize for one of her books. “She said a lot of stuff about our future and later, when I would ask about it, she’d act like she’d never heard it before. As I got older, I realized that it was all things that she wanted for herself but she knew would never happen.”
“That’s…I was going to say sad, but it’s also mean,” he told me. “It was mean to make you believe them.”
“I didn’t, not after a while. I got pretty skeptical in general.”
“That’s why you write everything down?”
