The Fake Date That Got Real

The whole thing was ridiculous and I knew it before we crossed the Manitoba line. I was forty-three years old, a golf course superintendent with a bad knee and a truck full of tools, and I had agreed to pretend to be my best friend's boyfriend for an entire wedding weekend. Tucker, forty-two, arcade technician, the man who once ate a gas station hot dog off the dashboard of my car on a dare, needed me to convince his mother he was taken.

"So remind me why I'm doing this," I said, watching the wipers slap rain off the windshield.

"Because my mom has a list," Tucker said from the passenger seat. "An actual list, Hayden. Women in her church group with single daughters. She laminated it."

"She laminated it?"

"Corner protectors and everything. She keeps it in her purse like a menu."

I laughed until my eyes watered. "And me being your boyfriend stops that how?"

"Because she respects a relationship more than she respects a hunting opportunity. You she knows. You fix her lawnmower every spring. You're basically family, so making it official just closes the file."

"Like a paperwork thing."

"Exactly. Real deal, no drama, everyone relaxes."

I had known Tucker since we were twenty-one, two kids crammed into a college dorm that smelled like burnt popcorn. Two years as roommates, and then twenty years of friendship after that. Golf trips, helping him move apartments three times, him showing up with soup when I had the flu. Nobody on this earth knew me longer.

And nobody on this earth would believe I was dating him.

Not because of anything bad. He looked good. Tall, still had all his hair, laughed with his whole chest. I was the awkward one, the guy who stood at parties near the snack table like the table was his date. That was the voice in my head, and it had been loud the whole drive.

"It's fake, right?" I said, mostly to myself.

"Fake as a three dollar bill," Tucker said. "Handshake deal. One weekend, a few smiles for my mother, and then it's over and nobody owes anybody anything."

"Deal's a deal. No money owed either way."

"Nobody's paying anybody. You're doing it because you love me." He grinned. "Platonically. Sort of."

"Shut up and navigate."

The snowplow depot sat at the edge of town, a big gray barn of a building with a new coat of paint and string lights everywhere. Tucker's cousin had bought it at auction and turned it into an event space, which still cracked me up. A hundred weddings a year in a building where town workers used to bolt plow blades onto trucks.

Tucker's mother, Jess, was on the front steps before we even parked, holding an umbrella like a shield.

"There he is! There's my boy!" she hollered over the rain.

"Hi, Mom." Tucker got the full hug treatment.

"And Hayden! Get up here, you're getting soaked."

She pulled me under the umbrella and hugged me too, and it was warm and genuine and I felt instantly guilty for lying to her. Then she looked between us and got the exact smile I'd been warned about.

"So. You two. Finally."

"Finally," Tucker said, easy as anything.

"Finally," I echoed, and my voice cracked like I was still going through puberty.

Jess laughed and waved us inside. "Come in, come in. Everyone's in the hall. Dinner's at seven."

Inside it was all wood beams and fairy lights and round tables. On the big stone mantel, next to framed family photos, sat a small golden trophy. I stopped in front of it.

"Is that a spelling bee trophy?"

Tucker came up behind me. "Yep."

"Rivercrest Elementary, Grade Six," I read off the little plate. "Tucker, you never told me this."

"Because it's embarrassing."

"You won a spelling bee. That's not embarrassing, that's adorable."

"I fainted on stage after. That's the embarrassing part."

I pointed at the trophy. "Your mother displays this. Right there. Between your graduation photo and a ceramic duck."

"It's her favorite trophy, she says. Because I fainted with dignity."

I heard Jess laugh from the kitchen doorway. "He spelled 'chrysanthemum' perfectly and then hit the floor like a sack of flour," she called. "Best day of my life."

"I will bring this up at every family dinner until one of us dies," I told Tucker.

"Please don't."

"Chrysanthemum," I whispered. "C-H-R-Y..."

"I will push you down these stairs."

Over the next hour I met half the wedding party. The groom, Tucker's cousin Patrick, shook my hand twice and said "good for you two" with a wink so aggressive it should have come with a warning label. I was getting the hang of the fake boyfriend thing. Standing near Tucker. Nodding when people said we made a nice couple.

Then the rehearsal dinner started, and I met the ex-flirt.

His name was Grant. Forty or so, expensive jacket, teeth that gleamed with perfect whiteness. He worked in insurance in Winnipeg and he had clearly decided, sometime before we arrived, that Tucker's new relationship was a technicality.

"So this is the boyfriend," Grant said, sliding into the seat next to Tucker while I was off getting water. I came back to find him leaning in close, hand resting on the back of Tucker's chair.

"Yep," Tucker said, stiff as a fence post.

"Because I seem to remember a certain Christmas party a few years back. Under the mistletoe. Ring a bell?"

"It rings a faint, regrettable bell," Tucker said.

I set the water down and did something without thinking. I stepped in behind Tucker's chair and put my arm around his waist, casual, like I'd done it a hundred times. My hand settled on his hip like it lived there.

"Hey, babe," I said. "You want the water or the lemonade?"

Tucker made a small sound that was not a word.

Grant's smile flickered. "And you're Hayden?"

"That's me."

"The golf course guy."

"The golf course guy," I agreed. "And the boyfriend. So. How do you know Tucker, exactly?"

"Through his mother, mostly," Grant said, and the confidence had drained right out of his voice. "Church picnics."

"Fun." I did not move my arm. "Well, don't let us keep you from your table."

Grant drifted off toward the far end of the hall with the quick steps of a man retreating. I stayed where I was for another second, and then I realized what I'd done, and where my hand was, and that Tucker had gone completely still under my arm.

I pulled back and sat down across from him. "Sorry. That was..."

"No," Tucker said quickly. "No, that was good. That was exactly the play."

"Was it? I panicked."

"You did not panic. You were terrifying. Grant looked like he'd been hit with a rake."

"He touched your chair, Tucker. The chair is sacred ground."

Tucker laughed, but it came out strange, half a beat late. He picked up his fork and put it down again. His ears were red. His actual ears, the tops of them, pink under the fairy lights.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Fine. Totally fine." He took a drink of water. "You, uh. You didn't have to do the whole arm thing."

"Boyfriend manual says casual arm around waist is level one. I skipped ahead."

"Yeah, well." He was looking at his plate. "It felt real is all."

And there it was, sitting between us on the tablecloth like an extra fork. I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and the dinner rolled on around us with toasts and clinking glasses and Jess beaming at the two of us from the head table.

Later, while people milled around with coffee, Tucker's aunt cornered me to ask how long we'd been together and I said "a while" and she said "oh, that long?" and I nearly choked. Tucker rescued me by steering me toward the mantel again.

"Look at it again if you want," he said. "Get it out of your system."

"I'm getting it engraved on a plaque for your fortieth birthday. Wait, that passed. Forty-second then. Belated."

"It fainted with dignity, Hayden."

"You fainted."

"Gracefully."

Outside the rain picked up, hammering on the old tin roof, and somebody near the door said the outdoor concert tomorrow night was probably toast. Tucker and I looked at each other at the same moment.

"Well," he said. "Three days in a snowplow depot."

"With your spelling bee trophy."

"God help us both," he said, and he was smiling, and something in my chest did a thing I decided not to examine until much later.

The concert was officially dead by ten that morning. Patrick put out a group text saying the band couldn't set up in the rain, so everything was moving into the depot. Which meant the big gray barn that had held sixty people for a rehearsal dinner was about to hold a hundred and forty for a party.

"It'll be cozy," Tucker said, watching through the window as the rain came down sideways.

"It'll be loud."

"It'll be loud and cozy."

By evening he was proven right on both counts. The band set up in the corner where the old plows used to park, and the sound bounced off the tin roof until the whole building hummed. Aunties danced. Children ran laps. Jess cornered me twice to tell me I had "good shoulders," which I chose to take as a compliment.

Around eleven Tucker grabbed my sleeve and tilted his head toward the far end of the hall, past the bar, where a staircase climbed up to a loft Patrick had built for storage. There were two folding chairs up there and a bottle of wine somebody had left on a crate.