The Venue Shifter

I've been a wedding DJ for twenty-six years, twenty-three of them married to Siobhan, and in all that time I've learned one thing about the job. The DJ is furniture. People talk over you, dance around you, spill drinks near you, and nobody remembers your name by the time the cake is cut. I liked it that way. Being invisible is useful when you're stealing from people.

Siobhan and I had a system, and it had worked for three years since the guy in Delco stiffed us on a gig and left us eating the cost of a rented sound rig. He'd paid a deposit in cash and she noticed the caterer kept two sets of paperwork. After that, we started noticing things everywhere. I work the booth, she works the kitchen, and between the two of us we know where every dollar in a wedding hides. Padded invoices, "lost" deposits, a vendor or two who owed us a favor. We're not violent people. We're just patient ones. The plan was always to do it a few more years, bank the cash, and buy a little place on the coast where nobody asks what a DJ and a waitress did for a living.

Willow Hall was our biggest score yet. It's a converted barn out past the county line, peeling wallpaper in the ladies' room, a reception hall with a draft you could feel from the head table. The Romano-Nicholas wedding was booked for a Saturday in June. Christie Romano was forty-two, a catering manager herself, which made Siobhan's in a little easier. The groom, Sergei Nicholas, was forty-four and had money from some software company he'd started back in his twenties. Rich groom, insecure venue, sloppy bookkeeping. Twenty percent of the floral deposit was going to walk out the door with us, and nobody would ever feel a thing.

We did the walk-through on a Tuesday in May. The venue manager, a nervous man named Timothy, showed us around while Siobhan did her thing. She's fifty-one and can pass for staff anywhere. Within ten minutes she'd learned the kitchen layout, the walk-in cooler, and the name of every woman on the hall's payroll.

"Booth goes there," I told Timothy, pointing at the corner near the doors. "I'll need access to that outlet and somewhere to store my cases overnight."

"Storage closet out back has room," Timothy said. "It's a mess, but it locks."

It was a mess. Extension cords, broken folding chairs, a dead string of Christmas lights. I stood in there mentally measuring it while Siobhan caught my eye from the kitchen doorway and gave me the little nod. Everything was going to plan. That should have been the end of it.

Christie came with her mother to the sound check two weeks later. I'd seen her at the walk-through from a distance, but this time she walked right up to the booth while I was setting levels.

"Can I ask you something?" she said. "It's silly."

"Ask away."

"Can you play 'Crash Into Me'? It's from the nineties and I know it's not a cool first dance song, but I love it. Sergei thinks it's corny but I don't care."

"First dance or just during the night?"

"Just during the night. Maybe twice, if nobody's watching."

I laughed before I could stop myself. "It's my favorite song too. I've had that album since I was twenty-six."

Her face lit up in a way that had nothing to do with the wedding. "Get out. Nobody ever admits that. Everybody pretends they outgrew it."

"Nobody outgrows it. They just pretend in front of other DJs."

We talked for maybe five minutes while her mother wandered the hall measuring things with her fingers. Christie told me she'd been in catering since she was twenty-three, that she'd planned four hundred events and still cried at the toasts. She asked what I listened to on the road. I told her, more than I'd told anyone at a gig in years. When she walked away I caught myself watching her go, and I thought about Siobhan, somewhere in the kitchen wall, and how she'd call that conversation a liability. A mark isn't supposed to feel like a person. That's rule one, and I'd written it myself.

* * *

The next time I saw her alone was a Thursday, two weeks before the wedding. I'd come out to do a final gear drop and Timothy had left me to my own devices. I was in the storage closet digging for extension cords when the door opened and Christie stood there in jeans and a windbreaker, hair in a rubber band.

"Timothy said I might find you in here. The caterer's van won't start and I need to borrow cords for the tasting tomorrow. Do you have spares?"

"Bottom of that pile, the orange ones. They're my oldest but they work."

She dug through the pile and came up with the cords, and then she didn't leave. She stood there holding them against her chest and looking at me in the dim light of the bare bulb.

"I've been thinking about that conversation," she said. "The song. You're the first person at this whole circus who talked to me like I was a person instead of a checkbook. Sergei's family talks about the wedding like it's a product launch. My mother talks about it like it's her funeral. You asked me what I listen to."

"It's kind of my job to ask people things."

"It's not your job to care what the answer is."

I didn't have anything to say to that, because it was true. She stepped closer. The closet smelled like dust and rubber. She was looking at my mouth, which is a thing you learn to notice after twenty-three years of watching rooms.

"Ellis," she said. "Would it be completely crazy if I kissed you?"

Every alarm I owned went off at once. And I heard myself say, "No. It wouldn't be crazy."

She kissed me soft and slow, her free hand flat on my chest, the orange cords still balled against her side. I kissed her back for about four seconds before my brain kicked the transmission back into gear and I pulled away.

"Wait," I said. "I can't do this. You're getting married in two weeks."

She stepped back, but she didn't look embarrassed. She looked at me with this warmth in her eyes that I hadn't seen aimed at me since I don't know when. Maybe since before Siobhan and I became what we are.

"I know when I'm getting married," she said. "I also know that nobody's looked at me the way you did at the sound check in about ten years. Not Sergei. Not anybody."

"Christie..."

"I'm not asking you for anything. I just wanted you to know I noticed. That's all."

She took her cords and left, and I stood in that closet for a long time with my heart doing something I didn't have a name for. Siobhan had a word for people who got soft on a mark. She had several words, actually, most of them learned from her mother in Southie. I could hear every one of them.

The problem wasn't the kiss. The kiss was four seconds and I'd had four seconds before, back when I was single and the booth had a beer budget attached to it. The problem was that when she looked at me like I mattered, some part of me that had been shut off for twenty-three years turned itself back on without asking permission. I thought about the coast. I thought about the floral deposit, twenty percent of eight thousand dollars, sixteen hundred, the first piece of the last score before we quit. Clean money, easy money, money that had never once felt like anything at all.

Then I thought about her face when she said nobody's looked at me like that in ten years, and the way she'd asked before she touched me, like my answer was worth something. Sergei was a stranger to me. A name on a contract, a guy with a software company who thought a song from the nineties was corny. Christie had a mother who measured tables with her fingers and a van that wouldn't start and eyes that lit up over a Rex Matthews album.

I dug the rest of the cords out of the pile and loaded the van, and I did not have a plan for what I was going to tell my wife.

Siobhan caught the payout meeting on Friday morning, which was our usual spot, the diner off Route 9 where the coffee came fast and nobody knew us. She had the ledger spread out next to her eggs and walked me through the numbers one more time.

"Floral deposit, sixteen hundred, that's already sitting in the account. Video guy is padding his invoice by nine hundred, that's his cut, he doesn't know we're taking a second bite off the venue side. Timothy's rental numbers have about thirty-five hundred of air in them. Total take, call it fifty-one hundred split even." She looked up. "Ellis. Are you listening to me?"

"Listening. Fifty-one hundred. Then the coast."

"Then the coast." She stirred her coffee. "You've been weird since the sound check. Weird like you're somewhere else."

"I'm just tired. Wedding season."

She let it go, which she almost never did, and that scared me more than if she'd pushed. We split the check and I drove home and did not tell her about the storage closet. Four seconds. I kept telling myself it was four seconds and it didn't count, the way a guy tells himself things.

The thing is, I started finding reasons to be near Christie. The bridal shop where she worked Saturdays was ten minutes off my route home, and three times that week I pulled in for no reason I could say out loud. First time I bought a pack of gum I didn't chew. Second time I asked about veil rental for a fictional niece. Third time she was at the counter and we both just looked at each other like idiots until another customer came in.

"You're going to get me fired," she said the third time, quietly, ringing up nothing.

"You're going to get yourself fired, showing up at venues to borrow cords."

"That was legitimate." She smiled at the register. "Come by Tuesday. I'm here till six."

* * *

Tuesday I went. We talked in the stockroom between racks of gowns about nothing, about her mother, about Sergei's mother, about the coast, which I mentioned like it was a place I'd read about. She laughed at my impression of Timothy wringing his hands over the drafty barn. Her hand found mine on top of a stack of favor boxes and stayed there.