47. Margot #2
Birdie got the first glass and the first spoon and the entire evening's worst idea.
"I've prepared remarks," she announced, unfolding an actual document, and Mateo, wisely, sat down.
"I met Margot eleven years ago, and I knew within a week that I would one day speak at her wedding, and I knew within a month that it would be to a completely inappropriate man, and let history note that I was right on both counts.
" She lost the thread of her own notes almost immediately.
"I called it, by the way. I called this the day he pulled that ungrateful cat out of a burning building.
I said, Margot, a man doesn't run into a fire for a cat he hates unless he's in love with the woman who owns the building, and I stand by the analysis. "
"You called him the concerning one for a solid month," Mateo said.
"I contained multitudes, Mateo. A woman can find a man concerning and correct at the same time, that's called nuance.
" She raised the glass, forgot the couple entirely, and toasted my grandmother instead, and cried, and toasted the cat, and cried harder, and had to be gently steered by the elbow back toward the actual bride and groom, at which point she looked at the two of us and simply gave up on language and sobbed the word beautiful three times with escalating volume until Mateo took the microphone away for her own protection.
Luka would not toast. He stood at the edge of it all with a drink he was not drinking and eyes that were suspiciously bright, and when I found him he was blaming the lighting.
"It's the bulbs," he told me, not looking at me. "They run warm. It's a known irritant. I've got sensitive eyes, it's documented."
"You're crying at a wedding, Luka. It's allowed."
"I'm absolutely not, and I'll say this once.
" He turned, and gave up the pretense all at once, the way he does, furiously.
"I watch this family now. That's my actual job, they made it my job, and what I've had to sit here and watch for months is that impossible man learn how to be happy, and it's been genuinely disgusting to witness, and I've loved every revolting second of it, and if you tell him I said that I'll disappear you and I've got the skills.
" He wiped his face with the flat of his hand and pretended it was his hair.
"He's the best man I've ever known. Now go away before I do something we both regret, like a feeling. "
It was somewhere around the second hour that Old Semyon lodged his complaint. He is roughly a thousand years old and comes from the part of Daniil's history that nobody narrates in daylight, and he arrived at my side with the grave bearing of a man delivering a diplomatic protest between nations.
"I wish to register something," he said. "It is not personal. You are a lovely bride and you will forgive an old man his standards. I have been seated at table four."
"Is table four bad?" I asked.
"Worse than bad. It is beside the kitchen.
" He let that land as though it explained a war.
"In my day, a man of my years placed beside the kitchen was being told something, and it was not a kind thing, and I have buried men for less.
I do not say this is what is being done.
I say only that it could be read that way, and I wished it noted. "
"Semyon, I seated you by the kitchen because you told Daniil, three separate times, that the only food at these things worth eating comes out first and hot."
He considered this for a long moment, and something ancient and pleased moved through all the folds of his face.
"That is true. I did say that. It is excellent strategy.
" He patted my hand with a paw like a warm brick.
"Withdraw the complaint. Enter into the record instead that the bride thinks ahead.
It bodes well." He was, twenty minutes later, holding full court at table four, feeding the bakery twins stories that could not possibly be true and were probably all true, happier than any man beside a kitchen has ever been, still occasionally reminding the table that a formal outrage had nonetheless technically occurred.
Late in it, when the good exhaustion had set in and the shop had gone gold and low and half the block was swaying between the stacks to something soft Mateo had put on, my husband pulled me in against him, one hand low and careful over the curve of our kid, and I got to think the word husband now, and we moved barely at all, which is the only dancing either of us has ever been any good at.
"I got it," I told him, into his collar.
"It's the love story, the real one. And I need you to understand, as a professional, that it's better than anything I ever wrote, which is frankly humiliating, because I wrote thirty-one of them and meant none, and this is the only one I didn't have to make up. "
He was quiet for a moment, in the particular way he goes quiet right before he says the truest thing in the room.
"I love you," he said. "That is the whole of it. I looked for a better sentence for thirty years, and there was never going to be one."
And I, who have made my entire living on better sentences, stood in my grandmother's shop in my husband's arms and understood that he was right, and that it was, in the end, the only good line in the whole story that I did not write myself.