600 PM Mia
She couldn’t get a drink to save her life.
Cocktail hour ended in five minutes, and for the last ten she had been standing here, sweating through her dress, waving at a bartender in a guayabera shirt.
“Hello? Drink, please?” she said.
The bartender smiled at her. He asked the man next to her if he’d like another margarita.
Mia pinched the bridge of her nose. “Jesus Christ.”
Weddings had become a blood sport. A few years ago, when people first started getting married, there was a kind of novelty to them.
She would get one invitation a summer, maybe two, and each time she would hold the envelope in her hand, not quite believing what she was seeing: the dates written out in thick black calligraphy; the inclusion of the bride’s middle name.
The ceremonies were in churches, or at country clubs, and if she was lucky there would be a gift bag with potato chips and Tylenol waiting for her in a hotel room she was splitting with Adam.
But then something changed. It had happened during the last two years, though if someone asked her to pinpoint when, Mia would be hard-pressed to give an exact answer.
All she knew was that she had taken two vacation days and emptied part of her savings account to come and watch Courtney Paulson get married in Cancún.
Or, no, sorry—Riviera Maya, because for the last five months, if you happened to mention that Courtney was getting married in Cancún within five miles of where she happened to be, she would materialize in front of you like some matrimonial wraith and say, “Well, actually, Mia, it’s not Cancún, it’s Riviera Maya, and there’s a difference. ”
Mia had never asked her to explain the difference. Whatever it was, it couldn’t change the fact that she had a terrible sunburn, or that yesterday when she was exiting the airport, she’d had to negotiate her way through a horde of drunk college students brandishing souvenir cups from Senor Frog’s.
Also: last night after the rehearsal dinner, she’d nearly stepped on a scorpion.
It was in her hotel room, doing God-knows-what next to her flip-flops, and when she saw it she screamed so loudly that Adam had run over to check on her from four rooms away.
But none of that mattered, because Courtney and her fiancé, Geoff (Geoff!), were getting married.
Her father had hired the lead guitarist from Saturday Night Live to play at the reception, there were whispers of a big surprise, and when the official party was over, there would be an after-party on the other side of the resort with a made-to-order quesadilla station.
To get there, they would all ride bikes—these big, slow beach cruisers that the hotel had in storage and that Courtney figured would be a cute touch.
Mia was still working out how all that would happen.
There had to be about two hundred guests at the wedding, and so far she had seen only seven bikes.
The resort covered something like one billion acres.
The paths that snaked through it were dark and covered with a layer of fine white sand, and the bikes’ tires were stripped of their treads.
She was imagining Courtney’s grandmother, pedaling in her muumuu, when the guayabera-ed bartender finally caught her eye.
“Dime,” he said.
“Just a gin and tonic, please.”
“No gin and tonics.”
“What do you mean, no gin and tonics?”
The bartender pointed to a small sign, standing on the side of the bar. It was printed on a piece of stiff pink paper and set in a frame made of seashells.
“Signature cocktails only.”
Mia looked at the sign. “What’s the Geoff and Tonic.”
“It’s a gin and tonic.”
“Then I guess I’ll have the Geoff and Tonic.”
She checked her phone for a text from Sasha.
She and Theo weren’t there—they were off snorkeling, or swimming with dolphins, or drinking mai tais out of coconuts, or getting lava-rock massages, or doing whatever else two people did on a honeymoon to Hawaii.
Earlier in the afternoon Sasha had sent her a picture of the sunrise from the top of a volcano, and Mia had responded with a picture of the dress she was wearing, a green midi that was covered with tiny birds of paradise.
The invitation had said that the dress code was Formal Hacienda Chic.
She understood the words by themselves, but when she saw them strung together, they lost all sense.
She was also worried they were, in a way she couldn’t quite articulate, a little bit racist.
In fact, she was worried that this entire thing was a little bit racist. Last night everyone had been given a sombrero to wear at the rehearsal dinner.
The entertainment was a mariachi band, comprising the hotel’s staff: at one point music started playing, and Mia turned around to see the woman who had checked her in at the reception desk, strapping a guitar around her neck.
On the schedule of events that she found in her room, there were instructions to fiesta, siesta, repeat.
It would be one thing if Courtney’s last name were Gonzalez, but it wasn’t.
Her mother was British, and her father was named Ronald Paulson; Geoff looked like a guy you’d see on a tourism poster for Norway.
The green midi with the tiny birds of paradise was an atrocity.
It was the best thing she could find. I look like Gumby, she had written to Sasha, but she saw now that Sasha had yet to respond.
The bartender sloshed gin over three cubes of foggy ice.
A drop of sweat worked its way down Mia’s spine.
Courtney and Geoff’s wedding was the sixth of the season; Theo and Sasha’s had been the fifth.
At least they hadn’t made Mia fly to Cancún, or Tuscany, or Zanzibar, or anywhere else that would have required her to take out a mortgage or get vaccinated against yellow fever.
At least they were considerate enough to keep things in New York.
All Mia had to do was get herself across the East River and to the Plaza.
But it had been touch-and-go for a minute there.
A year earlier, when they first got engaged, there had been rumblings about Provence.
Sasha floated the idea to Mia one Saturday morning, and Mia had nearly spit coffee in her face.
“Provence!” she remembered saying, hearing the malice in her voice only once it was too late. “As in, France?”
Sasha frowned. “Yes, as in France. Is there another Provence?”
“Do you have family there or something?”
“Family? In Provence? Ha, no. We both just really like it. We went on that vacation to Aix last summer and had a great time.”
Mia nodded. Of course they’d had a great time—it was Provence and Sasha’s parents had paid for it.
They had rented a villa with a stone pool surrounded by fields of lavender—Mia knew, because Sasha had posted eighty-seven pictures of it to her Instagram account.
Still, that didn’t mean they had to get married there, for God’s sake.
There were plenty of places that Mia had gone on perfectly lovely vacations, and you didn’t see her planning weddings at any of them.
You didn’t see Mia planning weddings at all.
“Do you think that would be crazy?” Sasha had asked. “Be honest with me.”
Taking another sip of her coffee, Mia tried her best to cultivate a thoughtful expression.
“I can tell you think it’s crazy,” Sasha said.
“I never said crazy.”
Sasha crossed her legs. She said, “It’s probably for the best. Provence is too hot in June.”
In the year leading up to her wedding, Sasha was always asking Mia if she was crazy, and Mia never knew how to respond.
Was getting married in France—particularly when the only link you had to it was a single vacation to Aix for which your parents paid—crazy?
Yes. Absolutely. Totally, utterly crazy.
Didn’t she know that half of marriages ended in divorce?
What was she going to tell people then? At her second wedding, was she going to apologize to everyone for making them fly to France for her first wedding?
That wasn’t the only thing that was crazy either.
Also crazy were the questions that Sasha had asked Mia about the sentimentality of peonies, and the difference between sea bass and sole, and whether chocolate fountains were fun-tacky or tack-tacky, and whether she thought it was a bad idea to let Richie Fournier give a speech (the answer was yes).
These conversations left Mia dizzy and conflicted.
She knew it was her duty to be happy for Sasha, and to share in her excitement.
Anyone could see that she and Theo were in love—they complimented each other’s terrible jokes, and always made a show of predicting what the other one was going to order at a restaurant.
Yet whatever happiness Mia felt was always followed by a sharp impatience, and a disappointment that Sasha had fallen for the same basic clichés that Mia had expected her to avoid.
It had also made her worry that something was wrong with her, with Mia—that her breakup with Marco had drained her of whatever earnestness was required to have conversations about centerpieces.
She tried to put on a good face, but lately she was finding it impossible.
In the thirteen years they had known each other, Mia had never seen Sasha act so irrationally—after talking to her, Mia was often left with an overwhelming urge to throw Sasha from a very tall building, or set herself on fire.
In the end, maybe this made sense. Sasha was her best friend.
The bartender handed Mia her drink.
“Your Geoff and Tonic, senora.”
“Senora?”
“Senorita?”
“Better.”