The Wedding People

Chapter 18

In the morning, Lila stops by on her way out to the flower vendor. She does not say anything about the blending of the families, just talks about a power outage and all the flowers that are melting in the fridge.

“Melting?” Phoebe asks.

But Lila doesn’t explain. “I need you to take Gary to run some errands today, because a fun fact about Gary is that he can hardly walk right now.”

“Why not?”

“He hurt his back again. This time from surfing. Thank God I didn’t go. What a disaster. Imagine if I couldn’t walk today? I don’t know what Past Lila was thinking, planning a surfing morning before her wedding.”

“I want to point out that it’s only nine in the morning and you’re already talking about yourself in the third person,” Phoebe says, and Lila laughs.

“Lila is too busy today to be worried about that right now.”

But Phoebe is worried—she’s not sure she’s ready for a full day with Gary. She’s supposed to be letting go of him.

“Why doesn’t Jim take Gary?” Phoebe asks.

“Because Gary has to try on his tux and go to the barber, and I just don’t trust Jim. I feel certain that Jim would somehow send Gary back with a pink suit and a shaved head.”

Phoebe wants to say something else but isn’t sure what. Lila turns toward the door.

“You have your speech for tonight ready?” Lila asks.

“I do,” Phoebe says.

“I can’t wait.”

Lila leaves, and Phoebe looks at the speech again.

“Oh no,” she says. In the brutal light of morning, the speech is all wrong. It is way too honest. Nothing at all about Gary and Lila. Part op-ed, part long literary analysis, part sermon on the most extravagant, wasteful weddings in literature. “Every wedding, even a successful wedding, is a waste,” Phoebe wrote, followed by a series of examples from literature that prove how the modern wedding has gotten totally out of control, how she blamed Queen Victoria for most of it, because prior to her big white dress, weddings in nineteenth-century literature were small affairs that happened in a sentence: “Reader, I married him.” Then, a final and totally random concluding side point about how annoying it is when the female protagonist claims she never wants to get married, yet somehow gets to have the biggest wedding in town.

It seems I’ll just be winging it, Phoebe thinks, and feels surprised at how excited she is by the challenge. She always gave her best lectures when she didn’t plan them too much, when she was too busy to prep. If she planned too intensely, if she wrote it all beforehand, she got flustered halfway through, because they were always longer than she realized. She overdid it. She rarely trusted herself to be herself, even though the students liked it more when she looked at them, when she just stood there like a person and was honest about all the things she knew and all the things she didn’t know.

G ARY WAITS OUTSIDE the lobby in his car—a nonvintage, regular Hyundai. He is already in the passenger seat. Phoebe gets in to drive.

“I hear you’re in pain,” Phoebe says.

“So much pain,” he says. “Do you want to hear all about it?”

“If it will make the pain go away, sure.”

“It will make the pain feel… useful. Give us something to talk about, you know.”

Phoebe rolls down her window. She wants to feel the ocean air.

“So, the pain,” he says.

“Is it… painful?”

“Right. That’s the word. Painful.”

They laugh. They take off. He talks about his aches and pains, and then she talks about her aches and pains, and then they talk about how much more fun it is to talk about their aches and pains than their younger selves expected it would be.

“It honestly doesn’t even feel like complaining,” Gary says. “It’s just like, valid subject material.”

“I agree,” she says. “How are we not supposed to talk about the slow decay of our bodies?”

“It’s truly the most dramatic thing that will ever happen to us,” he says. “It’s basically like being on a sinking ship. Except you’re never allowed to acknowledge that the ship is sinking.”

“And then people roll their eyes every time you mention that the ship might be sinking,” Phoebe says.

A car pulls up next to them at the light, blasting Kesha so loudly, it ends the conversation. They just sit there and wait, two faithful subjects of Kesha’s universe.

“I truly cannot believe it when people drive by with their music that loud,” Gary says after Phoebe takes a right.

“Maybe they think we like it,” Phoebe says. “Sort of like when you’re obsessed with a favorite song and you can’t imagine anyone else not wanting to hear it a thousand times. They’re probably just driving around thinking they’re doing us a service, like, Everybodyyyy likes my music!!”

She sings that last part loudly, and Gary cracks up. He rolls down his window and repeats her song. “Everybodyyyyyy likes my music!”

This is her last day with Gary. She knows this. It deeply saddens her, and yet, at the same time, she is grateful for it. Excited, even. Determined to enjoy it, to want nothing from it but the day itself.

“I aspire to be them, in some way,” Phoebe says.

“Really? I’m so embarrassed about my musical tastes, I don’t even like turning the radio on when someone is in the car.”

“What would you do if I asked you to turn on some music right now?”

“I would deflect the question and ask what you would like to listen to since you’re the driver. Dealer’s choice.”

“Oh, so you’d make your anxiety seem like some noble self-sacrifice.”

“Exactly.”

She feels playful, like everything is a grand laugh. Even their aches and pains—just a joke between them. A thing to be shared. She turns left onto Bellevue Avenue, and if Phoebe forgets he is getting married tomorrow, and that her life is over, it is a beautiful drive.

They stop at the liquor store. “This should only take a minute,” he says. “It’s preordered.”

They go inside and Gary moves to pick up the box but can’t do it with his back. “Shit.”

“I got this,” Phoebe says. As she brings the box of booze to his car, it occurs to her that she is literally helping Gary and Lila get married with her own brute strength. But that is her job.

Back inside the car, her phone dings.

“It’s Geoffrey!” Phoebe says. “Craigslist isn’t just for murderers!!”

“Huh? Who is Geoffrey?”

“The mansion keeper,” she says. She hands him the phone. “The winter guy. Hey, can you read this aloud?”

“In any particular accent?” he asks.

“You do accents?”

“Only around total strangers.”

“What are my options?”

“New York,” he says. “Boston. Rhode Island. I’m limited regionally.”

“When in Rhode Island.”

“Hi, Phoebe,” he says, in a Rhode Island accent, which is just a more pronounced version of the way his mother talks. “Thank you for your interest in the Newcombe Mansion. I must say, I am keen to meet you, as I am very delighted to hear you have a PhD in nineteenth-century literature. As you know, the Newcombe Mansion was built in 1845 by a Civil War hero, Jonathan Newcombe, so this seems fortuitous. I hope I have the chance to meet an applicant with your level of expertise.”

“Wait, a winter keeper?” Gary asks, in his regular voice. “What are winter keepers?”

“People who caretake mansions. In the winter, when the owners are at their real homes. Turns out it’s a job in Newport.”

“Newcombe is a twenty-room property,” he reads again in his accent. “I would love to show you. I am available to meet you anytime this afternoon or tomorrow. I am hoping to have the matter settled before the end of the weekend.”

“Holy shit!” she says. “Tell him I can meet him later after I drop you off.”

“No, sorry,” he says. “I’m coming with you to see this mansion.”

“But we have to get your tux,” she says.

“That can wait.” He writes back to Geoffrey, and she puts the address in Waze.

“Wait, why don’t you have a Rhode Island accent?” she asks. “Aren’t you from Rhode Island?”

“I took a speech class at Yale, trained myself out of it.”

“Wow,” she says. “Traitor.”

T HE N EWCOMBE M ANSION is guarded by tall iron gates that someone painted blue. The gates open as they approach.

“Naturally,” Gary says.

Geoffrey waits for them in the front entrance. He is a small, Southern man wearing a light peach suit. He looks especially small next to the big house. The entrance is so formal, with giant gargoyles up on the roof, and when Phoebe says hello, she half expects Geoffrey to bow or curtsy. But he shakes her hand like any old American.

He welcomes her into the house and starts by telling her that this is a position exclusively for caretaking the interior.

“We have people for the grounds,” he says. “But our main interior caretaker of ten years just unexpectedly resigned.”

He asks what experience she has caretaking nineteenth-century mansions, and she tells him she has no experience, though researched many for her dissertation. She doesn’t harp on the fact that most of them were fictional estates, often discussed primarily as metaphors for colonialism.

“In my line of work, I research historical buildings a lot,” she says. “I have a chapter in my dissertation about Victorian domestic interiors. I study the way nineteenth-century novels portray domestic space as primarily female and the natural world as primarily male.”

She tells him about the years she spent in the basement archives, and it feels good to talk about her research again. All those hours in grad school she spent cataloging the effects of each room on the characters in Jane Eyre —she would sit in the library and look up and before she knew it, it would be dark. She loved those early days, when she didn’t know exactly what she was writing yet, when she was just on the cusp of figuring it out.

“Excellent,” Geoffrey says. “Because this is a job about research. Let’s say this fabric wallpaper from 1845 starts to tear. What do you do?”

“I don’t know,” Phoebe admits. “But I would research it until I found out.”

Geoffrey laughs.

“Somehow, I believe you,” he says. “Shall we?”

They turn to the door and Phoebe sees a face carved into the wood. “Is that Dante?”

“I’m really glad you know that,” Geoffrey says.

H E TAKES THEM through the grand courtyard. He tells them about the owner, how he built this house for his daughter, Elizabeth.

“You can see Elizabeth’s collection of Parisian art in the dining room,” Geoffrey says. “She ended up marrying a French banker, who is featured here in this painting. But they didn’t get along, and Elizabeth spent much of her time traveling the world, collecting the art and the vases you’ll see everywhere in this house.”

Then he gets a phone call.

“I need to take this,” Geoffrey says. “Why don’t you go through and look at the place on your own, let me know what you think?”

T HEY WANDER THROUGH the house. Every doorway is framed with elaborate woodwork. Muses painted gold in each corner. The face of Cicero carved above the bathroom. And a tub made of marble so thick, it looks like a coffin. Phoebe runs her finger along the frame of the bathroom mirror.

“I think this is platinum leaf,” she says.

“Platinum leaf?” Gary asks. “I didn’t even know that existed.”

They head into the bedroom, where Elizabeth’s art collection continues.

“Do you think a woman who collects art like this is the happiest woman?” Phoebe asks. “Or the least happy?”

“The question presumes that we can be happy,” Gary says.

“Can we not?”

“I think we talk about happiness all wrong. As if it’s this fixed state we’re going to reach. Like we’ll just be able to live there, forever. But that’s not my experience with happiness. For me, it comes and goes. It shows up and then disappears like a bubble.”

“When was the last time you were really happy?” Phoebe asks Gary.

“The honest answer?” he says. “Right now.”

She wants to ask why this is. Is it because he’s getting married tomorrow? Or because of how it feels to be standing here in this mansion together? Phoebe feels strikingly happy, like this kind of connection between two people can fix everything. For just a moment, she fantasizes about them living here, together, roaming the halls, talking about Parisian paintings at breakfast.

“I think the collector’s impulse is both beautiful and repugnant,” she says.

To collect is to care more than most. But it is also to hoard. To take things out of the world and make them only yours.

“Art collections were basically like travel souvenirs for these people,” Phoebe says. “Going to Paris and bringing back seven wall paintings.”

They stare at Elizabeth’s bed.

“Is this where you’d sleep?” he asks.

“I think this is where Elizabeth’s ghost sleeps.”

He laughs, and they look at the portrait of Elizabeth above the bed. She feels drawn to this woman. Maybe because she, too, lived alone in her own way, lived alone inside her marriage.

“I think you’re right,” Gary says, then he turns to her. “Can I see your phone, please?”

She hands it to him. She knows what he’s going to do before he even does it.

“When you’re living here, I want you to call me when you actually do see a ghost,” Gary says, tapping in his number.

“What are you going to do about it?” she asks.

“Nothing,” he says. “You’re right. I’m famously ineffective against ghosts. Just ask Juice.”

She laughs.

“But promise you’ll call anyway?” he asks.

“I promise.”

She looks down at the old wood floor, puts the phone in her pocket. It feels like she keeps something special in there now. The future, where she lives in this beautiful house and can call Gary when she needs to.

They walk into the next room.

“What do you think Geoffrey meant when he said, ‘I believe you,’ like that? Was that an insult?”

“I think, coming from Geoffrey, it’s the highest praise of all.”

“Is it something about my voice or my hair?” she asks.

“I think it’s just your vibe,” Gary says. “You come off as… very smart. Like you’ve studied everything and now have all the world’s knowledge inside of you.”

“Is that obnoxious?”

“It’s the best.”

When Geoffrey returns, he quickly apologizes, then says, “So what do you think?”

“It’s wonderful,” Phoebe says.

He takes her down the hall. “You can use the whole house as your own, but this would be your bedroom. We like to keep Elizabeth’s as her own.”

Her bedroom would be small, but she has always liked small bedrooms. Never liked the way her bed at home didn’t fill up the room. Always felt like something was missing. But this bedroom is understated, a simple yellow-and-blue color palette. A cozy place to go when this house feels too big.

“Perfect,” Phoebe says.

“The job would start in three weeks,” he says. “But you could move in a few days before. Let me talk it over with my partner tonight, and we’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

Then, he takes them to the garden, a formal one with boxwoods carved into spirals. They walk up a small hill and sit on a tiny bench because from there, you can see the ocean.

W HEN THEY GET back in the car, Gary looks at his phone.

“Shit, I actually need to stop by the office to sign a few papers. Take care of things before I leave for the honeymoon. Do you mind?”

The honeymoon. In three days, Gary and Lila will be on a plane to St. Thomas. They will be married. They will be drinking champagne with rings on their fingers. And where will Phoebe be?

“On a Saturday?” Phoebe asks.

“We’re open until noon.”

Gary’s office is in Tiverton. It looks like a house. Sits on the side of a beautiful coastal road, because most of the roads are beautiful here. On the edge of the country. It gives Phoebe this feeling like she is just about to fall off.

Inside, the receptionists see Gary and get excited. They have missed him, but they also want to know what the hell he is doing here.

“We’re not supposed to see you until tomorrow at the wedding!” one of the receptionists says.

It is nice, she thinks, how he invited his whole staff to the wedding.

“I just couldn’t stay away,” Gary teases, and then goes into his office.

Phoebe waits on the chairs outside. She tries to imagine Lila and her father here doing the same, but it’s hard to picture it. She listens to patients stand at the counter, casually spewing their tragic family histories aloud to the receptionist who asks about gaps in their medical history. Grandparents wiped out by lung cancer. A father who the daughter doesn’t know. Many brothers and sisters, she adds.

“But I don’t know those, either,” the woman says, and she doesn’t sound ashamed. It’s just a fact. She has no family. Then she sits down, and Phoebe is impressed. Phoebe makes a note to start practicing that—not feeling ashamed of her family history but understanding it as just a fact.

On the wall, there are computer screens you can touch to learn more about your diagnosis. A playset in the corner for children. Seasonal decorations for every holiday. On the way out, Gary explains that there’s no point in taking them down just to put them up. And they like having all the holidays with them at all times of the year.

“That’s nice,” Phoebe says. “Why not?”

“Exactly,” Gary says.

This is Gary’s life, she thinks.

A T THE TAILOR , the woman tells him he has the build of a football player. She tells him to spread his legs.

“Good, fits well,” she says and looks at Phoebe. “What do you think?”

Does she think Phoebe is the fiancée? Gary looks at her, like he’s waiting to hear what she thinks, too. And why? If she doesn’t like it, is he going to ask for a new one? Is he not going to get married? No.

“Looks good,” Phoebe says. “You look like… a groom.”

Outside on the street, where honest communication is possible again, they don’t speak. Here they are, alone together, headed to the car. Here they are, on the precipice of the rest of their lives.

“So if you become a winter keeper, that would mean you would move here and quit your job in St. Louis?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says.

“You would just leave everything behind?”

“That’s the plan.”

He pauses like he is skeptical of this. “You won’t miss it?”

“Of course I will,” she says. “But even when I was there, I missed it. I missed everything all the time.”

They get back in the car. She wonders if her feelings for Gary could be a new form of love, one she’s never known before: love without expectation. Love that you are just happy enough to feel. Love that you don’t try to own like a painting. But she doesn’t know if that is a real thing. She hopes it is. She looks out at the parking lot all around them, like she’s a kid going on an errand with her father, announcing whatever she sees.

“That’s a creepy billboard,” she says. “What’s Mummy’s Favorite Music? Why would that be a billboard?”

“I think it says, What Is a Mummy’s Favorite Music? Not, What’s Mummy’s Favorite Music?”

They try to guess what kind of music a mummy might like.

“Baroque?”

“It would really matter when the mummy died.”

“Synth-pop.”

“A postmodern mummy.”

She turns on the car.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Ready,” she says.

But they continue to sit there for another moment, and it feels like the hot tub all over again, as if something is supposed to happen now, as if she should say a thing that will start her brand-new life, but what?

She can’t destroy a wedding. This wedding is too big to fail. This wedding is like the revolution of the earth. It’s going to happen whether Phoebe says anything or not. Whether anybody is in love or not. What right does she have to say anything?

“Where to?” she asks.

She needs to go back, needs to get out of this car before she says anything.

“To the barber,” Gary says.

T HEY GO TO this guy Nick that he used to see when he was a boy. It’s out of the way but worth it, he says on the drive. Nick used to carve lightning bolts in the side of his head. Nick gave him his first buzz cut. Then a shave for his first wedding. But it’s been years—Gary invested in self–hair cutting tools during Covid and never looked back. Yet here they are, pulling onto a side street, and Gary sounds excited, like they’re traveling back in time.

“You got an appointment?” Nick says as soon as they walk in, but he doesn’t turn his head from the man’s hair he is clipping.

“You don’t do appointments,” Gary says.

“I do appointments now,” Nick says. “Since Covid.”

Gary looks at the line of men waiting on chairs and says he would have made one had he known.

“I’ve got some room on Monday,” Nick says.

“Monday is too late. But thanks anyway, Nick.”

“Too late? You off to fight the British or something?”

“Getting married,” Gary says.

“Are you the lucky bride?”

“No,” Phoebe says. “I’m just a friend.”

Nick looks at the two of them like he doesn’t quite believe it. Why else would she be here, watching him get a shave?

“For you, the groom, I’ll make time,” Nick says. “You’ll just have to wait.”

While they wait, they don’t talk. They listen to the men on TV talk about the Celtics. Then the wind turbines going up on the coast. Then the hotly debated bike lanes in Providence. There is something routine about the silence, like sitting in a church pew where everybody knows not to talk, even the small boy who just kicks his legs. It’s not until the last man is called to Nick’s chair when Gary speaks.

“So you really won’t miss teaching?” Gary asks, as if they had been in some long conversation about it.

“I’ll miss some things about teaching,” Phoebe says.

“Which things?”

“The moments of connecting with students,” she says. “The moments when they really do learn something. The back-and-forth. The way it feels to have a really good class. I did love it when I first started.”

“What won’t you miss?”

“The pretending,” she says. “I never realized how much pretending was involved.”

“Pretending to be what?”

“Pretending to be excited. Pretending you haven’t said the same exact joke over and over again. Pretending knowledge is some beautiful, fortuitous interweaving quilt of facts. Pretending that everything that happens can be strung along a satisfying, linear narrative.”

“Is that what you said during your job interview?”

“I said something worse. I invoked Marx.”

“Solid move. Everybody wants to hire a Marxist.”

“I was pretty committed to pretending I was a Marxist then. I went on and on about how difficult it is to measure student progress, how there’s no guarantee that they’ve learned anything, and how teachers, too, are alienated from their labor. We so rarely get to understand our effect on the students, yet we work anyway.”

This is why she always needed research and writing.

“It was nice to create something,” she says. She loved the thrill of discovery, of being able to look at the document at the end of the day and say, I did that. Like being a barber, she imagines. Getting to see the final creation. Trimming a man’s hair just over the ears, then dusting him off. And when she stopped wanting to write, it was an actual loss. She can see this now, how she has been grieving that, too. The loss of her creativity.

“Bastards put in meters while we were all asleep during Covid,” Nick says. He picks up change out of an old ash tray. “Got to feed this thing four times a day. When I’m back, you’re up.”

Then they’re alone in the shop. They don’t speak. It is only the sound of the TV that threatens to dull the moment, turn it into nothing.

“Are you pretending to be something right now?” Gary asks.

“Excuse me?”

She grows hot. She is pretending, yes. She is pretending to talk about pretending to be a Marxist when really she just wants to tell him that she thinks she might be in love with him, that she hasn’t felt this connected to anybody ever, not even her husband, because she has never looked her husband in the eye and admitted she wanted to die, never actually showed her husband her full self. This whole week has bonded her to him and running errands with him does not help. Something about watching him sign papers at the office, watching him wait at the barber, watching him just be ordinary Gary.

But she had love once, great love, and that didn’t end up mattering.

“I’m pretending not to be confused,” Phoebe says. “How am I doing?”

“Excellent performance,” he says. “You never seem confused.”

“Well, I’m confused.”

“What are you confused about?”

“Whether or not you are pretending to be something right now.”

He pauses. “I’m pretending I don’t want to say something to you right now. I’m pretending that it does not make me very nervous.”

“Can I ask what’s so scary about it?”

“I don’t know how to phrase it. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know what happens after I say it.”

She gets the feeling that if this conversation continues, something irrevocable will happen.

“But unfortunately there’s no one else I can tell,” he says. “No one to talk to about it with… except you.”

“Then talk to me about it.”

“It’s so easy with you,” he says. “I don’t understand it.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“I felt it when we talked that first night. I honestly cannot stop thinking about that first night in the tub. And trust me, I’ve tried. I have been trying to figure out why I can’t stop thinking about you, because I am getting married tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she says. “You are getting married tomorrow.”

“But I feel so drawn to you,” he says. “I just want to be around you, Phoebe. Because when I’m around you, I feel good. I feel honest. I feel like myself. Like maybe I understand what life is again. I know what to say, finally, after years of never knowing what the hell to do or say. Do you know what I mean?”

Phoebe knows. She feels this way, too. Exactly. And she wants to tell him. It would feel so good to tell him.

“Is that crazy?” Gary asks. “You’re looking at me like that’s crazy.”

“I don’t think it’s crazy. I think it’s scary.”

“It’s scary,” he says.

“It’s very scary that you’re saying this all to me the night before your wedding,” she says. “I don’t think you should be doing that.”

“When else am I supposed to be doing it?” Gary asks. “If I don’t do it now, when do I do it?”

The door dings. Nick is back.

“You got to use a fucking credit card now,” Nick says. “So, the usual?”

“The usual,” Gary says.

Gary gets up, slowly. Phoebe watches as Nick takes the clippers to the thick mass of Gary’s beard. Phoebe watches Nick work, like a sculptor, who is trimming off layers of Gary, until he arrives at “the usual.” It makes Phoebe nervous, seeing pieces of Gary fall off in giant clumps to the floor. After, Nick puts a towel over Gary’s face and, for some reason, when he starts to shave him, Phoebe can’t watch. Looks down at her magazine. She has always liked the sound of the razor against a man’s stubble. Like the sound of a mason spreading mortar on a brick.

When he’s nearly done, Phoebe looks up, and they lock eyes in the mirror. They stay like that for a moment, just looking at each other. Nick nicks him on the back of the neck. Phoebe instinctively leans forward as if to help with the blood. But Nick’s got it.

“Happens all the time,” Nick says, and puts a towel to his skin.

“I’m not sure I’d go around telling your clients that,” Gary says, and the two men laugh.

“So you’re still a wise ass,” Nick says.

T HE WHOLE WAY home, it’s like driving with a different Gary.

“Is it weird?” Gary asks. “Do I have beard face?”

“What’s beard face?”

“It’s like glasses face. When you’ve only seen someone with glasses and they take them off, and all of a sudden, they’re a different person.”

“Maybe,” she says. “I think it’s more like when someone brings a dog to the groomer and the dog comes out looking like it’s been robbed.”

“Oh, gee, thanks. A dog that’s been robbed. Totally the look I was going for.”

They laugh. He looks at himself in the mirror, rubs his chin, like he can’t get used to it.

“I do feel a little like I’ve been robbed,” he says.

Maybe this is when one of them would have started up their conversation from Nick’s again, but Gary says, “Shit, I forgot about cash for the vendors. I’m sorry. One more thing.”

“No problem,” Phoebe says.

T HEY CAN ’ T TAKE out enough cash at the first bank, so they drive to another bank, and at the second bank, Phoebe just waits in the car. She watches him disappear into the building, and then studies the strangers on the road. She sees families on vacation. Non-wedding people eating ice cream. Collagen shot lattes. People just shopping, carrying on. People who have no idea that Lila and Gary exist.

Amazing to think that just last week, Phoebe was one of those people, too. She had been so bold then, doing exactly what she wanted for maybe the first time in her life. She wants to feel that feeling again, the one she felt in the elevator, the one she felt in the tub, the feeling of standing up proudly in her lingerie, of owing Lila absolutely nothing, being loyal to nobody but herself. Because Phoebe knows what Lila cannot know yet: There is no reason to make decisions you don’t want to make at twenty-eight. No reason to marry a man with gray sideburns if you hate the look of them. They are only going to get grayer.

Yes, Lila will be just fine, she thinks.

But then she sees Gary come out of the bank and put the money in his wallet, the wallet in his pocket, and something about this looks so final to Phoebe. He looks like such a groom, clean-shaven, putting money in his wallet to pay the vendors for his wedding. And Phoebe feels like the maid of honor again, with the box of booze heavy in the back seat.

She is loyal to Lila now. Loyal to the production that is this wedding—that’s the truth of it.

When Gary gets back in the car, he says, “Should we finish our conversation?”

But Phoebe says no. “I honestly don’t think there’s anything left to say.”

Phoebe just drives.

W HEN THEY STEP in the lobby, the hotel feels very empty. Like a stage just before the big performance. Everybody must be off doing their last-minute tasks before the rehearsal, getting dressed in their costumes.

Gary and Phoebe are quiet in the elevator, quiet as Gary carries his tux and Phoebe carries the box of liquor down the hallway. Gary says, “Do you mind holding this?” and gives her the tux as he gets his key. It feels so intimate, like they are opening the door to their home after a long day of errands.

But before they enter, there is Lila coming out of her room. Lila looks at Gary and then back at Phoebe. A flicker of realization—Phoebe is certain that she saw it. Certain that Lila knows. Women can feel these things. They know. Phoebe knew. Phoebe knew in that moment when she saw her husband laugh with Mia. Love is visible—it paints the air between two people a different color, and everyone can see it.

But all Lila says is, “Gary, oh my God, your face looks so different!”

“Good different?” Gary asks. “Or bad different?”

Bad different, Phoebe thinks. He is the clean-shaven groom ready for his ceremony. A man she will probably never get to know. By the time the beard starts to grow back, they will be strangers again.

“Good different, of course,” Lila says.

Phoebe puts the booze down on the desk. Outside through the window, Phoebe can see Carlson setting up the chairs for the rehearsal dinner tonight. Phoebe feels a fog of grief, a sudden depression moving in like an afternoon storm. Like if she doesn’t run now, it’ll take her alive.

“I should go get ready,” Phoebe says.

Lila gives Phoebe a big strong hug like she did the first day they met. Maybe Lila doesn’t know. Maybe all Lila can feel right now is fear of what Lila doesn’t want, all the bad things circling around her like a boa constrictor, closing in tight.

“Two things,” Lila says. “It’s just you and me driving to the wedding tomorrow. And can you make sure my mother doesn’t get too drunk tonight? Apparently, she started drinking at two. Why does she do that?”

It’s a rhetorical question, but Phoebe can’t help herself.

“She can’t drink at night,” Phoebe says. “You’ll understand, when you’re older.”