The Rehearsal Dinner

The dress was too tight. Janelle had known that the second she sat down in Lewis's passenger seat, because the zipper dug into her spine every time she breathed. But he'd picked it out, or at least he'd picked the color and then she'd gone overboard at the mall, and now here she was at the Tryon Creek Community Center in a red dress she couldn't sit down in without strategy.

The hall smelled like roast chicken and somebody's too-strong perfume. String lights crisscrossed the wide plank ceiling, and about sixty people milled around with wine glasses, all of them family or close friends of the groom. Janelle knew maybe eight of them by face and Lewis's cousin Mel, the groom, not at all.

"There she is!" Mel's mother, a tiny woman named Pearl, waved Janelle over. "You're the friend, right? The package girl?"

"Carrier. Yes. Janelle." She shook Pearl's hand and got a quick lecture about how Mel met his bride at a climbing gym, which Janelle half listened to while scanning the room.

There he was. Lewis stood near the far window in a gray suit, talking to an older man who looked like a retired version of the groom. Lewis caught her eye and didn't smile. That was the rule. No recognition. Not yet.

She gave him a small nod. Just a nod, like you'd give a stranger you'd made eye contact with twice.

He nodded back and went back to his conversation.

Okay. So this was really happening. Janelle had agreed to this three days ago at his apartment, over takeout, when he'd said, "Wouldn't it be funny if we pretended we just met? At the dinner. Flirt a little. See what happens." She'd laughed and said sure, because it did sound funny, and because she was twenty-four and single and a little bored with being Janelle the package girl who everyone's mom tried to set up with their nephew.

For one night she could be anyone. That was the appeal, if she was honest, and she mostly was.

She made her way to the bar, which was actually a folding table with a college kid behind it pouring wine from boxes. The kid's name tag said DEVON.

"What can I get you?"

"Do you have anything that isn't boxed?"

Devon looked genuinely wounded. "There's a merlot and a white blend."

"Wonderful," Janelle said, and took the white blend.

That was when she felt someone come up beside her, and she already knew who it was from the cologne, which was the same one he'd worn since they were twenty-one and she'd teased him about it for three years. She had to pretend she didn't know that. God, this was going to be harder than she thought.

"Is this seat taken?" Lewis asked.

"It's a bar. There aren't seats."

"Right. Good point." He leaned an elbow on the table like he was leaning on a real bar. "I'm Lewis. I don't think we've met."

"Janelle. I mean, I'm Janelle. Not that my name is Janelle, I am, that came out weird." She laughed, and the laugh broke whatever tension the game had built, which was maybe the point of the whole stupid thing. "Hi. Sorry. I'm bad at this."

"Bad at introductions? You've done those before, right? In life?"

"Twice. Both went badly."

He grinned and flagged Devon with two fingers. "White blend, my man. And whatever she's drinking, on me. Even if it's the same thing, which it clearly is."

"You didn't have to buy me a drink. We've exchanged like six sentences."

"That's exactly the right number of sentences to justify one drink. Any fewer is creepy, any more is a relationship." Devon handed him his glass and Lewis raised it. "To six sentences."

"To six sentences," Janelle agreed, and they clinked.

She looked at him sideways while he drank. It was strange. She'd seen Lewis a thousand times, in sweatpants, in his terrible winter jacket, hungover on his couch eating cereal out of the box. She'd never once looked at him the way you look at a man at a bar. The gray suit changed something. Or the game changed something. She wasn't sure which.

"So what brings you here?" he asked. "Besides the open bar and my charming company."

"I'm friends with the best man, supposedly. He invited me." She sipped. "You?"

"Cousin of the groom. Best man, actually, which is a lot of pressure. I have a speech. It's three minutes long and I've rewritten it eleven times."

"Eleven? What's wrong with it?"

"Everything. It's either too sappy or too mean and I haven't found the middle."

"He sounds like a nice guy. The best man."

"He's the best," Lewis said, and for a second his eyes did something warm and real, and she had to look down at her wine so she wouldn't break. That was the strange part of the game, the part she hadn't planned for. You couldn't fake being interested in someone. You either were or you weren't, and pretending to start from zero just pointed out that you weren't at zero at all.

"So, Janelle," he said, testing the name out. "What do you do?"

"I'm a package carrier. Regional shipping company. I drive a truck and lift heavy things and people wave at me like I'm Santa Claus."

"Santa Claus. That's not bad. I write software, which means I sit in a chair and move my fingers and then money appears. It's less charming than Santa Claus."

"It's less charming than almost anything," Janelle said, and he laughed the real laugh, the one she knew, and for a moment the game wobbled. She steadied it. "So, Lewis. You single?"

The question surprised him. She could tell because his eyebrows went up.

"Wow. Straight to it. Yes. Single. You?"

"Single. Never married. My mother asks about it weekly."

"Mine stopped asking. I think she's given up hope entirely."

"Poor woman."

"Poor woman," he agreed, and they both drank.

* * *

Out on the side patio, the air was cooler and the string lights didn't reach, so the ravine beyond the railing was just a black shape with the sound of water somewhere in it. Sherman had come out for exactly this. Two hours of Pearl telling the story of Mel's first piano recital, and he'd needed air.

He was forty-seven, retired from the fire department two years now, and his knees told him about it every time he stood up. He'd been a widower for two years as of March, and he still caught himself reaching for his phone to text Alba when something funny happened, which was the worst part, the reflex of it.

There was a woman at the far end of the patio, leaning against the railing, smoking. She was older, silver-streaked hair pinned up, a nice dress that fit like she'd chosen it for herself and not for anybody else. He recognized her vaguely from the receiving line. Wedding planner, he thought. Or family friend. One of the two.

"You know those things will kill you," he said, because it was the most banal possible opening and he wanted to see what she did with it.

She didn't turn around right away. She took a drag and exhaled toward the ravine.

"Sir, I have survived a twenty-five year marriage, the divorce that ended it, and three hundred eighty-seven weddings. The cigarette is the least of my concerns."

"Three hundred eighty-seven what?"

"Weddings. I plan them. This one makes three hundred and eighty-eight, but who's counting. Everyone, that's who. I'm counting." She turned and looked at him, and he liked her face immediately. It was a face that had decided not to waste time. "Dianna. You're the uncle, right? The firefighter."

"Retired firefighter. Sherman. How'd you know?"

"Rehearsal dinner, I know everything about everybody. It's my job. You're the groom's uncle, widower, sits with the older cousins, leaves early."

"That's... unsettlingly accurate."

"It's a gift and a curse." She tapped ash over the railing. "And you're leaving early again?"

"In about four minutes, yeah. I've hit my limit on piano recital stories."

"The recital story is a load-bearing story in that family. Pearl tells it at every milestone." She said it dry, and he laughed, and she noticed that he laughed, and he noticed her noticing, and for a second the patio got smaller.

"So which are you," he asked. "Family friend or hired help?"

"Both. My mother was friends with the groom's grandmother, God rest her, so I do family events at cost. Which means I'm here as a guest who also fixed the caterer's invoice at four o'clock." She held up the cigarette. "Which is why this."

"Fair enough."

They stood there a moment, both of them looking at the black ravine, and then Dianna said, "You notice how at these things there's a young people's party happening and an old people's party happening, and they're in the same room?"

"I've noticed."

"And the old people's party is better. The drinks are better, the stories are better, and nobody's checking their phone under the table."

"The young people are missing out," Sherman said.

"The young people are always missing out." She looked over at him then, a longer look than the conversation called for, and smiled a little. "Well. Sherman, retired firefighter. Enjoy the recital story. There's a second verse."

"There's a second verse?"

"Oh, there's always a second verse!" She dropped the cigarette, stepped on it, and headed back inside, and Sherman watched her go and thought, huh.

He gave it two minutes, out of dignity, then followed her in.

Inside, the band had started up, and it was the kind of band that plays rehearsal dinners, four guys who knew forty songs and played all of them at the same tempo. Lewis appeared at Janelle's elbow holding two fresh glasses of wine.

"Dance with me," he said.

"Can you dance?"

"Not even slightly. That's part of the charm."

"Wow, selling it hard over there." She took the glass, drank half of it like it was a shot, and set it on the bar. "Fine. But if you step on my feet, I'm invoicing you."

"I carry liability insurance for exactly this."

Devon, the college kid pouring wine from boxes at the bar, watched them go with the expression of a man who did not get paid enough to have thoughts, which was fine, because he didn't have any, he was just tired.

The floor was a square of cleared space in front of the band, wide plank floor worn smooth by sixty years of grange halls and wedding receptions. Lewis put his hand on Janelle's back, low, and that was the moment. That was the exact moment her evening got complicated.

Because the dress was thin. She'd known that when she bought it, it was a thin red dress on a hanger and it was a thin red dress on her, but she hadn't counted on the heat of his palm coming straight through it like the fabric wasn't there. His hand was big and warm and it sat right at the small of her back, and her whole spine did something unofficial about it.

Okay, she thought. Okay, so this is a thing that's happening.

"So," Lewis said, steering them into what could generously be called a rhythm. "How's your night going? Meeting anybody interesting?"

"One guy. Software developer. Kind of a smartass."

"Oh, avoid that guy. Bad news."

"Is he? What's wrong with him?"

"Nothing, actually. He's kind of great. Don't tell him."

She laughed, and it came out real, and then his hand shifted about half an inch on her back and the laugh caught in her throat. Four years. Four years she'd known this man, since orientation week when they'd both been twenty-one and lost and standing in the wrong line together. Three years of teasing him about his cologne, which he still wore, the same one, she could smell it right now (she had never once told him it worked on her, and she wasn't starting tonight, absolutely not, no sir).

The trouble with the game, she was realizing, was that pretend has to run on something, and what it was running on, in her case, was not pretend.

"You're quiet," Lewis said. "That's not like you. The fake you or the real you."

"Both versions are processing."

"Processing what?"

"Whether you've been able to dance this whole time and you've been lying to me for four years."

"Janelle. I stepped on your foot twice already."

"That's true. Okay. Exonerated."

But her hand was on his shoulder and his hand was on her back and the band played something slow, because bands like this always found one slow song an hour, and neither of them went to sit down. She could feel it through his suit jacket, the warmth of him, and she thought, this is dangerous, this specific arrangement of facts is dangerous, and then she thought, one night. He said one night. Nobody said anything about feelings.

"You know what's funny," he said, close to her ear now, and his breath moved a piece of her hair. "This morning I almost texted you to cancel. Cold feet about the whole bit. And now I'm thinking it was the best idea I've had in years."

"Was it? Why?"

He looked down at her. He didn't answer. That was the answer, and they both knew it, and the song kept going, and she let her thumb rest against the back of his neck like it was an accident, which fooled neither of them.

"Janelle."

"Yeah?"

"Later, when the party winds down. I was thinking maybe we don't stop the game at midnight. Maybe we see where it goes."

Her heart was doing something she declined to narrate even to herself. "You're asking?"

"I'm asking."

"Then yes. Obviously yes. Why do you think I wore the red dress, Lewis? You picked the color. I went with it on purpose."

His eyebrows did the thing again. She loved that about him, four years of documented eyebrow evidence. "On purpose."

"On purpose. Now shut up and dance, we're getting a look from Pearl."

They were. Pearl, a tiny woman who could have heard a pin drop at the top of a mountain, was watching them over the top of her punch cup with the expression of a woman revising a seating chart in her head. Mel, the groom, was watching too, from across the room, and gave Lewis a thumbs up that was honestly too enthusiastic for a man at his own rehearsal dinner.

* * *

Out on the patio, the darkness past the string lights was where the party went to be