The Barista's Wedding Date

Rudy Gerrard had nobody to blame but himself. He was forty-two years old and he had, three weeks ago, typed the words "come to my friend's wedding" into a dating app to a man he had never met face to face. Then he'd doubled down and said it was a good idea. Then he'd given the man the address of a restored Victorian inn on the Oregon coast.

He stood in the inn's parking lot with his suit bag over his shoulder and thought, not for the first time, that he should have just shown up alone and lied about working weekends.

The trouble was the wedding question. Every wedding asked it. So, Rudy, anybody special? And Zach's crowd was worse than most, because Zach's crowd had known him since his first year of college and had watched exactly one relationship in fourteen years sputter out when he was thirty-nine. After that it had been two years of apps and coffee dates and one guy who talked about crypto for ninety minutes. A wedding date that came pre-approved by an algorithm and had already heard Rudy's voice was, in theory, less work than dodging Aunt whoever.

In theory.

His phone buzzed. Clarence again.

*Driving through Newport. Be there by quarter past four.*

Rudy typed back *ok, saving you a seat* and then stood there like an idiot wondering if the exclamation point would have been warmer.

* * *

The inn smelled like wood polish and ocean. Rudy found Zach in the groom's room upstairs, pacing between two chairs that held a boutonniere and a beer.

"There he is," Zach said. "My best man. My brother from another mother. Rudy, tell me I don't look like a hostage in this suit."

"You look fine."

"Fine. Noel's mother said handsome. My mother said handsome. You said fine."

"Fine is what I say to people whose coffee I need to keep selling," Rudy said, hanging his suit bag on the door. "You're getting it at cost."

Zach sat down, then stood up again. Forty-one years old, about to be married, and he was pacing like he was waiting on biopsy results. "Did the flowers come? Somebody said the flowers were late."

"They came. I saw the truck."

"Okay. Okay." He looked at Rudy and his whole face changed into trouble. "Now you. Tell me about this guy."

"There's nothing to tell."

"You put it on the group chat, Rudy. You, a man who has posted four things on the internet in his life, sent a message to eleven people that said and I quote, 'bringing a plus one, don't make it weird.'"

"Which is why nobody should make it weird."

"His name is Clarence. He designs things. You've been talking for three weeks. That's everything I know and it's all from you." Zach picked up the boutonniere, put it down, picked up the beer. "Is it serious? Is this a meeting-the-friends thing? Because Noel's mother has been saving a single cousin for you like a lottery ticket, and if you show up with an actual man, she is going to lose her mind in a way I will find very funny."

"It's a first date," Rudy said. "At a wedding. Which I realize now is insane."

"It is insane."

"It seemed low pressure at the time. Everybody's already busy, nobody's watching us, there's cake."

"Everybody will absolutely be watching you. You know who's coming. You've known these people longer than I have."

"I've known you longer. That's a lower bar than you think."

Zach laughed at that, which was the point. Then he got serious in that way he had, squinting at Rudy as if checking a receipt. "Hey. For real. You good? You don't have to do this. Tell the guy the thing got canceled."

"I'm not going to stand the guy up at a wedding I invited him to, Zach."

"I'm just saying it's on the table."

"It's not on the table. Go get married." Rudy shoved the boutonniere at him. "Put the flower on. Come on."

Zach pinned it on crooked and Rudy fixed it, and for a minute neither of them said anything, and that was fine too. Twenty-some years of friendship meant you could stand there breathing while one of you trembled a little and nobody had to narrate it.

"It's almost four," Zach said. "Ceremony's at five. Where's your guy sitting?"

"He's still on the road. He's coming from Newport."

"Newport. That's two hours."

"It was his idea to come at all. Kind of."

"Kind of."

"It was my idea. He said yes." Rudy checked his phone. "He's like twenty minutes out."

"Rudy."

"What."

"Nothing. Go meet your boyfriend." Zach grinned and picked up his beer. "Don't make it weird."

* * *

Rudy waited out front on the porch, because the parking lot felt too much like a stakeout. At four-fifteen a gray Subaru rolled in and parked crooked, and a man got out who was not the man from the photographs.

Rudy knew it right away and felt terrible about knowing it right away.

The profile pictures were five years old, at least. The man climbing out of the Subaru was heavier than the photos, broad through the middle, with silver coming in heavy at the temples and glasses where the photos showed cheekbones. He was maybe forty-four. He was maybe more. He wore a decent blazer and he was already looking up at the inn with his mouth open, and the way he did it, no self-consciousness at all, just a man looking at an old building, took some of the sting out.

"Rudy?" the man called, from halfway across the lot.

"That's me. Clarence?"

"Yeah." He came up the porch steps and put out his hand. "Hi. God, okay. Hi. I'm here, I know, I always do that, I drive and then I drive too fast and then I'm early for everything and there's nowhere to put the car."

"You found the car spot fine."

"I parked over the line. There's a truck situation happening over there." He was still holding Rudy's hand. He seemed to notice and let go. "Sorry. Hi."

"Hi." Rudy tried to do the math on his own face, what his own profile pictures looked like, whether he'd used one from forty. He had, he realized. Everybody was lying a little. It was just that Clarence had lied more. "You want to come inside? There's coffee, which I'm contractually obligated to judge."

"You own the shop, right? You said. The one on."

"Third and Fir, yeah."

"I looked it up. There were reviews. A man named Darryl wrote four paragraphs about your scones."

"Darryl is a serious man."

Clarence laughed, a big easy laugh that didn't match the hand-shake nerves at all, and something in Rudy's chest unclenched about one notch. He still felt like he'd been handed a different meal than he ordered. But the man was funny, maybe. It was twenty minutes old. Time would tell.

"Listen," Clarence said, and dropped his voice, leaning in a little. "Before we go in. I should've said it on the phone, but I didn't, because I'm a coward about certain things. The pictures. They're old. I know you noticed. I watched you notice."

"I didn't."

"You did. It's fine. It's fair. Five years ago I had a jaw." He shrugged and adjusted his glasses. "So now you know. If you want to go in there and just be two guys who know the groom separately, I will not be hurt. I'll sit in the back and eat Darryl-approved scones and leave at nine."

Rudy stood there on the porch with the ocean going loud somewhere below the cliff, and thought about the group chat, and about Zach pacing upstairs, and about how he'd spent two years doing this the careful way and it had gotten him exactly nothing.

"No," he said. "Come in. Have a scone."

"Okay," Clarence said. "Good. Because I already scoped the dessert table through that window and it looks outstanding."

"It's Noel's aunt's doing. There's a rumor about a lemon cake."

"I heard lemon cake." Clarence held the door for him, which was backwards, since Rudy was the one who belonged here, but Rudy went through it anyway.

Inside, the ballroom smelled like lemon and coffee and somebody's too much perfume, and the string lights were already on even though the sun hadn't gone anywhere. Rudy steered them toward the coffee urn at the far end, away from the clusters of Zach's relatives, and handed Clarence a cup like he was presenting evidence.

"Be honest. I can take it."

Clarence drank. He stood there a second. "Okay. That's actually good."

"You sound surprised."

"I'm not surprised, I'm just... a man prepares his face for disappointment." He drank again. "Darryl was right about you."

"Nobody's ever been right about me. Write that down."

Then it happened. Rudy saw it coming the way you see a cart getting away from somebody in a parking lot. Noel Chavez came across the ballroom in her wedding dress with her heels in one hand and her expression fixed on Clarence, and her mouth was already open.

"Oh my God. Clarence Hartman. It is you." She arrived and touched his arm with two fingers, like confirming a rumor. "You came. You actually came, you never come to anything, you turn down every invite, I've been telling Shawna about you for years and she doesn't believe you exist."

"Noel." Clarence looked as if he had been caught in his own driveway by a census taker. "You look beautiful. Congratulations. This is Rudy."

"Rudy, yes, of course, the best man, the coffee man, we've met." She waved that away and turned her whole body toward Clarence, and Rudy understood that he had already been dismissed from the conversation that was happening about him. "Okay, so. Don't be mad. There is someone here you have to meet. My cousin Bill's son, Martin. He's forty-one, he does something with solar panels, he's very handsome and extremely single and he just went through a thing so he's fragile, but in a nice way. He's over by the fireplace."

"Noel, I."

"You never come to anything," she repeated, with the tone of a woman who had waited five years to deploy this fact. "So God has clearly delivered you here today for a reason. Come on. Two minutes. That's all I'm asking. You don't have to marry him, although honestly."

She had his sleeve. Rudy watched it happen with his cup halfway to his mouth. Clarence looked back at him over his own shoulder, and the look said, plainly, do you see this, and also, help.

Noel glanced between them and her face did a small thing. "Wait. Do you two know each other?"

"We've met," Rudy said. "Casual acquaintance."

"Casual," Clarence agreed, from somewhere behind the sleeve.

"Well then he won't mind if I steal you for two minutes." Noel tugged. "Rudy, don't let anyone refill your glass, the toasts are at seven and Zach made me swear."

And she hauled him off toward the fireplace, where a tall man in a gray shirt stood holding a glass of sparkling water like it had been assigned to him. Rudy stood there with the coffee urn. The lemon cake was visible across the room. It looked, he had to admit, outstanding.

* * *

Clarence escaped two minutes later. Rudy knew it was two because he'd been watching. Clarence came across the ballroom at a pace that was polite from a distance and basically jogging up close, and grabbed Rudy's elbow, and steered him. There was an alcove off the ballroom, a dead end with a grandfather clock and a dead fern and a window looking out at the cliff lawn, and Clarence steered them both into it and stopped.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. That was."

"Two minutes, you said."

"She asked me four questions about solar panels and then she had my entire dating history out of me like she was pulling a tooth. I told her things. I don't even know what I told her. I think I told her about the woman in Bend."

"The woman in Bend."

"Two thousand nineteen. Never mind. The point is." He took his glasses off and cleaned them on his blazer, which did nothing, they went back on the same. "The point is she thinks we're strangers. She saw you and me talking and she read it as, what, two guys who met once at a hardware store."

"That's more or less what we told her."

"I know. That's the problem." He looked out the window at the ocean, which was doing its thing down there, gray and steady. "I don't like lying to Noel. She was decent to me at that firm. She covered for me the month my mom was sick. She took all my shifts and told the boss I had a doctor thing."

Rudy leaned against the wall next to the dead fern. "So tell her the truth."

"The truth is weird."

"The truth is always weird. That's how you know it's the truth."

Clarence made the big laugh again, quieter this time, one burst through the nose. "That's a terrible thing to say and I'm going to use it forever." He turned and looked at Rudy, actually looked, and Rudy felt it land somewhere in the middle of his back. "Okay, look. Here's the whole thing. I used old pictures. I told you that on the porch, that part's handled. But there's the other thing, which is that I said yes to this wedding like a lunatic. Who drives two hours for a first date. Newport. Two hours. I told my sister I had a client thing."

"You have a client thing."

"I have a client thing that I invented at two o'clock this afternoon in Newport traffic." He