730 PM Mia
“A Geoff and Tonic,” Mia told the bartender. “A double, please.”
She reached into her purse for her phone. It had been over two hours and Sasha still hadn’t responded to her dress picture. She texted her again.
Mia: you will not believe this but courtney sat me at marco’s table
Mia: emily is here too. her ears are bigger in person.
Mia: like huge
A light breeze blew hair across her cheeks, and when she reached up to adjust the straps of her dress, a sunburn smoldered her shoulders.
Wincing, Mia touched a spot on her collarbone.
Richie came to stand next to her. His shirt was unbuttoned to the bottom of his sternum, and when he breathed on her his breath was sweet, tinged with the scent of white wine.
He ordered a bourbon on the rocks and ran the back of his hand across his nose.
A strand of damp hair stuck to his forehead.
“Satya’s wedding was more fun,” he said. “They had that brick-oven pizza buffet, and that was just during cocktail hour.”
The bartender handed Mia her Geoff and Tonic.
She said, “I wasn’t invited to Satya’s.”
Richie frowned. “I could have sworn you were there.”
“Well, I wasn’t.”
“To be honest, beyond the pizza buffet, I don’t remember most of it.”
“Only that it was more fun than this one.”
“Yes. Exactly.” There was a maraschino cherry in his glass of bourbon. He ate it and dropped the stem to the sand. “How’s it going over at table twelve?”
“Aside from having to stare at my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend while I listen to Mitch Reynolds name various sexual positions? Grand, Richie. It’s just grand.”
“Sitting you and Marco together—just a terrific move on Courtney’s part. Hats off to her.”
The emcee announced the mother-son dance. Mia watched as people rotated their chairs to face the dance floor, where Geoff and a small woman in a gold dress spun in slow, halting circles.
Richie chewed on a piece of ice. He said, “Emily’s very pretty, in a Jane Austen sort of way.”
“Fuck off, Richie.”
“You didn’t let me finish.”
“Then finish.”
Mia turned to him; Richie chewed another piece of ice.
He said, “I was going to say: ‘I always hated Jane Austen.’ ”
Across the dance floor, Mia watched Marco kiss Emily.
They pressed their foreheads together, and then began to laugh.
Richie looked at her—she could feel him.
A moment later he put his arm around Mia’s shoulders.
She flinched from the pressure on her sunburn, but then tucked herself against the warmth of his neck.
She thought of how there was a different version of this night, floating among the infinite possibilities that existed between if and then.
If, for example, Sasha had scheduled her honeymoon for a different week, then Mia wouldn’t have been sending her a flurry of unanswered texts.
If she had spent a little more time looking for a dress, then she might have found something that was a little more flattering.
If she hadn’t broken up with Marco, then she would be the one sitting with him at the table, fussing over his cowlick in between sips of lukewarm chardonnay.
But of course, none of that had happened.
What had happened was that Sasha had deliberately planned her honeymoon to coincide with Courtney Paulson’s wedding.
What had happened was that Mia had lost her patience in the resort-wear section of Bloomingdale’s.
What had happened was that three and a half years ago she didn’t book the cheap plane tickets to Bogotá or Medellín, nor did they ever decide how many days to spend on the coast. What had happened was that Mia told Marco that she wasn’t going to move to Washington, and she didn’t have any intention of stopping him either.
What had happened was that Mia got scared.
“Or, I don’t know, maybe scared is the wrong word,” Sasha had said to her, back when she was in the thick of it. “Maybe what I’m trying to say is that you’re being too absolutist.”
“What does that mean, absolutist?”
“I mean, he’s a great guy, Mia. And you clearly love each other.”
“I know that.”
“And it’s just Washington, DC. It’s not like he’s asking you to move to Dubai.”
“Would you move to Washington, DC?”
Sasha stopped to look at her. They were walking down West Twenty-Eighth Street.
“Me?” she said. “No. No, I wouldn’t. It’s a weird place, like there aren’t enough Italians, or something. But I think you could do well there. I’ve always said you’re very political.”
“I’ve never heard you say that.”
“My point is that I think you’re looking at this as an all-or-nothing decision, when it’s actually a little more complicated than that. That’s what I mean by absolutist.”
In fact, Sasha had gotten it right the first time: Mia was not an absolutist, Mia was scared.
The day before, she had gone to get her hair cut, and as a sort of experiment had told the stylist that she was moving to Washington because of her boyfriend’s new job.
The stylist raised an eyebrow—she glanced down at Mia’s hand.
“You’d better get a ring on that finger, then,” she said, before spinning Mia around to face the mirror.
An hour later she’d left the salon and walked and walked without knowing where she was going.
She didn’t feel old enough to be making this kind of decision—to be upending her life, and tying herself to one specific future.
What would happen if it didn’t work out?
She would be left alone in a new city where she knew no one, forced to begin all over again while everyone else carried on without her.
Of course, there was always the chance that everything would be fine—that if she were to leave New York with Marco, in a few years she would look back on this decision as one of the clearest and easiest of her life.
But how was she ever supposed be sure of something like that?
How was she supposed to put more trust in some distant hypothetical versus what was right in front of her?
On the dance floor, Geoff and his mother held each other at arm’s length and the music stopped; people clapped, and soon Mia heard the sound of utensils tapping against plates, the indecipherable mesh of a hundred different conversations.
A few minutes ago the sun had set. Now the water was a silvery purple, and across the bay lights shone on the beaches of Cancún.
Stars dotted the sky. As Mia touched the burned spot on her shoulder again, she heard the speakers near the dance floor crackle.
“Here we go,” Richie said, “showtime.”
Turning toward the stage, Mia saw Alison Liu standing up to give her maid-of-honor speech. With one hand she was balancing on a single crutch, and with the other she held a cordless microphone. Her toes stuck out from the end of her cast—pink, painted, exposed.
“What’d she do to herself?” Richie whispered.
“She broke her ankle training for a marathon. She stepped off a curb somewhere on the West Side, her foot twisted, and down she went.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. I ran into Courtney in McCarren Park and she told me all about it.”
She explained to Richie how, back at the end of May, she had been walking her dog, Baxter, when she saw Courtney doing calisthenics with a personal trainer wearing a tight black T-shirt.
Burpees, jumping jacks, high knees, walking lunges—at the distance from which Mia first spotted her, she appeared both miserable and vividly, terrifyingly alive.
Her engagement ring glinted in the sunlight.
When she saw Mia and Baxter, she’d held up one finger, finished three more burpees, then took a sip from a water bottle and began speaking.
“I guess Alison joined one of those running groups,” Mia told Richie. “The kind where you train for a marathon, and also fundraise for cleft palates or something.”
“That’s ridiculous. Doesn’t she know there are, like, a million other ways to meet a guy?”
“That’s exactly what Courtney told her.”
The speakers crackled again. Alison blushed, shifting her weight to her crutch.
Then she began speaking, her voice a little wobbly as she told story after story about her friendship with Courtney.
The time they met, in a seminar on Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Greece.
The time they went on a cruise to Belize.
The time they dressed up as Serena and Venus Williams for Halloween.
The time Alison met Geoff, at an all-you-can-drink brunch in Midtown, and Courtney got so drunk she puked on a stranger’s poodle.
The time Courtney asked Alison to be her maid of honor and both of them cried.
The time Courtney came to the ER with flowers when Alison broke her ankle.
The time Courtney got mad that Alison picked red for the color of her cast because it would clash with her bridesmaid dress.
It was not a good speech. The stories didn’t form a larger, coherent narrative, and often Alison paused, expecting to receive a laugh from the audience that never came.
When she got to the all-you-can-drink brunch in Midtown, someone dropped and broke a glass.
Occasionally Mia looked over to Courtney, who was sitting at a small two-top directly in front of the dance floor.
She was smiling, though her neck was strained, and she was wrapping a napkin tighter and tighter around her knuckles.
Mia felt bad for Alison. She thought of her own speech for Sasha, and the trouble she’d had writing it.
The pressure to be funny and earnest and original, when really she was confused and filled with a strange new kind of grief.
The challenge of distilling a friendship to three and a half minutes, while also pretending that something wasn’t being lost.
By the end of the speech, Alison had started to cry. Her voice halting, she said, “So, everyone raise your glass,” and Mia turned away. At that moment Richie released her shoulders. He finished what was left of his bourbon, then set the empty glass on the bar.
“Godspeed at table twelve,” he said. “And for what it’s worth, I think Marco’s balding.”
For the next minute she watched him walk through the crowd, the heels of his loafers sinking unevenly into the sand.
When he reached his table, he slid into his seat and immediately began a conversation with an older woman sitting next to him.
Another breeze blew across the ocean and through the palm fronds.
Mia’s Geoff and Tonic sat sweating on the bar.
Since ordering it she hadn’t touched it, had almost forgotten about it, actually, though now she picked it up and glanced at her phone.
There were no new notifications—Sasha still hadn’t responded.
Mia opened up the texts she had sent earlier.
She took a sip from her drink and began typing again.
Mia: sorry I know you’re probably fucking or snorkeling but also Marco’s going bald I think
Mia: you have to look from the right angle
Mia: and in the right light
Mia: but I swear he is
Mia: also Alison Liu fucking bombed her speech
Mia: was I that bad?
A moment later she saw three flashing dots on her phone’s screen, indicating that Sasha was typing, but then the three dots stopped and disappeared.
Mia took a larger drink, nearly finishing what was in the glass in a single swallow. She stared at the phone for a few seconds longer, then slid it back into her purse.