The stranger at the wedding

My cousin Debbie got married on a Saturday in June, at a restored farmhouse out past the county line. I was forty-two years old, divorced for two years, and I drove out there alone in my ten-year-old Honda with the check engine light on. That felt about right for my life at the time.

The place was pretty, I will give it that. Fairy lights strung between the big oaks, a dance floor laid right on the lawn, folding chairs with little white covers on them. Somebody had spent real money on it. I found my name card and saw I was seated at table seven, between a blank space and somebody named Tasha Howell.

I got a glass of wine first. You have to have priorities.

That is where I saw Derek. My ex-husband, standing by the bar with his arm around a woman in a green dress. He was my age, forty-two, and he looked good, which annoyed me on principle. The woman had long dark hair and was laughing at something he said. I had heard about her from mutual friends. Her name was Beth. They had been together almost a year.

And there it was, that hollow ache in my chest, the one I had gotten familiar with since the divorce. Not jealousy exactly. More like seeing a house you used to live in, painted a different color.

"Moira? Moira July?"

I turned. A woman about my age was smiling at me, holding a beer instead of wine. Short blonde hair, a nice laugh line situation around her eyes.

"Yes. Sorry, do I know you?"

"Barely. I'm Tasha Howell. I think we're table seven buddies." She stuck out her hand. "I'm thirty-eight, I work in event planning, and I know absolutely nobody here except the groom's brother, which is a long and boring story."

I shook her hand. Her grip was firm.

"Well, you've got one-up on me. I know too many people here. Including, apparently, my ex-husband."

She glanced over at Derek and Beth. "The guy in the blue shirt?"

"That's him. Derek. We were married fourteen years."

"Ouch. And he's here with someone?"

"With Beth. She seems nice, which makes it worse, honestly."

"Oh, that's the worst kind," Tasha said, and clinked her beer against my wine glass. "To nice people who make it worse."

I laughed for the first time all day.

We drifted toward table seven as the sun started going down. The dinner was buffet style, which Debbie swore saved money, and the chicken was dry, which nobody swore about but everybody noticed. Tasha sat down next to me and put her napkin on her lap like she was at a business lunch.

"So how do you know Debbie?" I asked.

"I don't, really. I know her new brother-in-law, Adrienne. He does the sound and lighting for weddings, and I plan them, so we work together about half the weekends of the year. He needed a date because his girlfriend had a work thing." She shrugged. "So I'm basically here as a favor. Like a rental friend."

"That's either very sweet or very sad."

"Both, probably. I haven't been on an actual date in three years, so a free dinner and open bar sounded great." She took a drink. "What about you? You here with anyone?"

"Just me and my Honda."

"The Honda is not invited to the dance floor, I assume."

"The Honda stays in the parking lot where it belongs."

She grinned at that, and I found myself sitting a little straighter in my chair. It had been a long time since somebody made me grin back.

Around us the table filled up. An aunt of the groom on Tasha's other side, two guys from Derek's office I vaguely recognized. Adrienne turned out to be a big loud man in a vest who told a story about a wedding where a goat got loose. Tasha had clearly heard it before.

"Goat. Got loose. Aisle six," she muttered, and I choked on my chicken.

"Stop," I said.

"I'm sorry, I've heard it eleven times. It has eleven more beats than it needs."

"So tell it better."

"Nobody can tell it better. It's a goat story. It tells itself." She pushed her potatoes around her plate. "How long have you been divorced? If that's too nosy, tell me to mind my own business."

"No, it's fine. Two years. Married at twenty-eight, done at forty. Fourteen years, if you count the last one where we both knew."

"That last one is the expensive part," she said quietly. "I did that with a boyfriend for two years before we admitted it."

"What happened?"

"He moved to Denver. I helped him pack. It was very adult and very miserable." She looked over at Derek and Beth again, quick, then back at me. "And you? Are you doing okay? You don't have to answer that either."

I looked at my wine glass. "I'm doing okay. Mostly. Some days I'm great and some days I see him laughing with somebody at a wedding and I feel like a hole opened up in my chest."

"That's honest. I like honest."

"Nobody at these things wants honest. They want 'I'm doing wonderful, how are you.'"

"Well, I'm not at these things for the small talk. I do small talk forty hours a week with brides' mothers." She leaned her elbow on the table. "So. Moira July. Freelance writer, I'm guessing, from the way you said it. What do you write?"

"Mostly corporate stuff, honestly. Brochures, websites, that kind of thing. I did a piece for a magazine last year about a woman who restores old barns. That was the fun one."

"That's a good job for a wedding like this. You can look at all the details and think, I could describe that better than whoever wrote the signs."

"The signs say 'LOVE IS SWEET' over the dessert table."

"See? Somebody got paid for that."

I was laughing again. Across the lawn the string lights came on as it got dark, and the band started setting up. Derek walked past our table with Beth on his arm and gave me a small nod.

"That's rough," Tasha said after they were out of earshot. "Having to nod at him."

"He was polite about it. He usually is. That was our whole problem, we were both too polite for fourteen years."

"So what did the divorce paperwork say, 'irreconcilable manners'?"

"Something like that." I finished my wine and looked at her. She was easy to look at, warm in the fairy light, and I realized I had been enjoying myself for a whole hour without checking my phone once. That never happened at these things.

"Can I ask you something, Tasha?"

"Sure."

"Does the rental friend business come with a dance floor clause? Because I refuse to be the only fool out there when the band starts."

She smiled slow, like she was deciding something.

"I think that can be arranged," she said.

The toasts started around nine. Adrienne grabbed the microphone first, which surprised nobody, and Debbie and her new husband stood under the big oak holding champagne flutes they weren't drinking out of.

"To my brand new sister," Adrienne boomed, "who once told me love was a scam invented by card companies, and who is now, quote, extremely happy, unquote, so what does she know."

Everybody laughed. Debbie made a face at him. The best man went next, then the maid of honor, and somewhere in the middle of it Tasha leaned close to my ear.

"I have to tell you something," she whispered. "And you have to not make a face, because we're in the middle of a toast."

"Okay," I whispered back.

"Adrienne didn't need a date. His girlfriend absolutely did not have a work thing, I made that up. He mentioned the wedding last month and I basically invited myself. I'm not here as a favor, I'm here as a plus-one he never asked for."

I kept my face perfectly still, which took effort. "Why would you invite yourself to a wedding full of strangers?"

"Because the alternative was Saturday night alone in my apartment watching a documentary about lighthouses."

"That doesn't sound terrible."

"It was my third lighthouse documentary this month, Moira. There are only so many."

I turned my head and looked at her. She was watching the toast with her chin up, like she'd just confessed to something much bigger and was braced for the verdict.

"So you talked your way into a stranger's wedding to avoid being alone," I said quietly.

"Basically. Do not tell Adrienne I told you. He thinks I came for the chicken."

"The chicken is dry."

"The chicken is a crime scene. But it's dry with people around it."

The maid of honor was crying through her speech and everybody was going aww, and Tasha and I sat there in our little conspiracy of two. It felt strangely good. It felt like being let in somewhere.

"I won't tell," I said. "But why not just come as yourself? A woman alone at a wedding is not a scandal."

"Because the second I told my mother I had no plans, she started sending me men from her church. A plus-one is armor. So I made up the girlfriend with the work thing, and Adrienne played along." She shrugged. "It sounded better at the time. It sounded better about an hour ago, honestly."

"Before I asked."

"Before you asked." She looked at me sideways. "You do this thing where you actually listen. It's very rude. It makes a person want to keep talking."

The toasts ended. The band started for real, and the dance floor filled up with cousins and coworkers and Derek, who danced the way he did everything, carefully, two steps at a time. Beth laughed at something he said.

"Come on," Tasha said, standing. "I need a drink that isn't warm white wine, and this bar line is going to be a mob scene in ten minutes. There's a second tent by the garden. The planners always put a quiet one somewhere."

"You're leaking trade secrets to me."

"I'm off the clock. Come on."

We slipped past the cake table, past the dessert sign, out along the gravel path toward the garden. The noise of the reception faded behind us and the crickets took over. The second bar tent was small and almost empty, staffed by a kid in a bow tie who looked grateful for something to do.

"What are you drinking?" Tasha asked.

"Gin and tonic, if it's not a bother."

"Two gin and tonics, my good man. Heavy on the tonic, light on the judgment."

"He's like nineteen," I said when we stepped away with our glasses. "He does not have judgment."

"Everyone has judgment. Nineteen-year-olds just have worse taste in what to judge." She took a sip and looked out at the dark garden. "Can I say something without you doing the polite face?"

"I don't have a polite face. I have a face."

"Since Denver, it's been quiet. That's the word for it. Quiet. I go to work, I make other people's perfect days happen, I go home, I eat standing up at the counter like an animal. Three years. My sister keeps a list of men she wants to set me up with and the list has gotten insulting."

"What's on the list lately?"