The Wedding of Us

Elaine had been a security guard for nineteen years, and she was forty-four now, and she could tell you the exact minute a wedding party was going to get rowdy just by watching how they held their champagne. That was her gift. That and being married to the busiest wedding planner in the county, which was less a gift and more a sort of beautiful, ongoing chaos.

She had met Kim at a mutual friend's party six years ago, when Elaine was thirty-eight. Kim had been thirty-five, Elaine always got that mixed up because Kim had one of those faces that never aged. Kim had been running the party like it was a client event, rearranging the snacks, fixing the playlist, and Elaine had watched her for an hour before working up the nerve to say anything.

"You know this isn't your party, right?" Elaine had asked her, handing her a drink.

Kim had laughed! Actually laughed, right in Elaine's face, in the best way. "Old habit! Somebody has to make sure people are having a good time. Are you having a good time?"

"I am now," Elaine had said, and thank God it came out smooth, because inside she was a total wreck about it.

They dated for four years before the wedding. Kim proposed on a Tuesday, of all days, at the kitchen table, with a ring taped under Elaine's coffee mug. Who does that? Kim does that. They got married a year after the proposal at the little stone chapel out past the fairgrounds, and Elaine cried so hard the officiant had to pause. Kim cried too. Everybody cried. It was perfect.

And then, well. Then came the drift.

It wasn't a fight. They didn't fight, hardly ever. It was more like... you know how a river moves a bank a little bit every year, and one day the picnic table that used to be on dry land is in the water? That was them. Kim worked nights and weekends planning other people's weddings. Elaine worked nights and weekends guarding other people's buildings. They passed each other in the hallway like polite roommates. "Did you eat?"

"Yeah, you?"

"Yeah." Kiss on the cheek. Door closes. Two different rooms, two different lives, under one roof.

Elaine thought about it a lot on her overnight shifts. She'd stand in an empty lobby at three in the morning and think, we fixed the gutters together last spring, when did we stop doing stuff like that? Was it when Kim's business took off? Was it her fault? Was it anybody's fault? She didn't know. She just knew she missed her wife, and her wife was sleeping ten feet away from her every single night.

So when Kim called her on a Thursday morning, voice all bright and busy, Elaine was already halfway to saying yes before she even heard the ask.

"Elaine! Hey! Are you on shift?"

"Just got off, actually. Why, what's up?"

"Okay, so, don't laugh. I need a security person at the Hollis Estate this Saturday. Just for the afternoon. The regular guy canceled on me, can you believe it, two days out? And I thought, well. My wife literally does this for a living."

Elaine sat down on the edge of the bed, smiling like an idiot at nothing. "You want me to guard a wedding?"

"I want you to guard MY wedding. Well, not mine, obviously, the Delgados'. But you know what I mean. Walk the grounds, check the gates, keep an eye on the shed situation, the venue manager is paranoid about the shed."

"The shed?"

"There's this old garden shed, it's got a lock nobody has a key for, and Mullen the groundskeeper keeps threatening to just cut it off but the historical society says no. Anyway. Will you come? Please? Isa's doing the flowers, and Janna's running around like a maniac, and honestly it would be so nice to see your face in the middle of all that chaos."

And there it was. See your face. Four words, and Elaine was gone, completely gone, she'd have guarded the wedding in a blizzard.

"Yeah," she said, trying to sound casual and probably failing. "Yeah, I can do Saturday. What time?"

"One o'clock. Come early if you want, I'll buy you coffee. The good stuff, not the machine in the office, the actual good stuff from the place on Vine."

"Kim, you had me at coffee."

She could hear Kim grinning through the phone. She was sure of it. "Okay. Okay, Saturday, one o'clock, wear your comfy boots, the back lawn gets muddy. Love you. Gotta go, the caterer is calling."

The line went dead, and Elaine sat there on the edge of the bed with the phone still warm in her hand, feeling sort of ridiculous and sort of wonderful all at once. Love you. Kim always said it on the way out, quick, like a coin tossed over a shoulder. When had they last said it slow? Facing each other? Elaine honestly could not remember, and that sat on her chest a little.

* * *

Saturday came up bright and cool, one of those early fall days that makes everything look like a photograph. Elaine got to the Hollis Estate at noon, an hour early, because of course she did.

The place was gorgeous. A big Georgian manor with dark wood paneling inside, all these old windows, and the gardens went on forever. Weddings happened here every weekend in season. The stone cottage off to the side was the dressing suite, and there, sure enough, was the garden shed, squat and gray, with a rusted padlock on a hasp that looked older than everybody at the wedding combined.

Kim came out of the cottage at a jog, clipboard in one hand, phone in the other, and a flower crown perched crookedly on her head for some reason.

"You're early," Kim said. "You never come early to anything."

"I come early to you."

"Oh, stop." But Kim was blushing. Forty-one years old and she still blushed, and Elaine loved that about her, she had always loved that about her. "Okay, so, quick tour. Gates are all chained except the main drive. Guests come at three, ceremony at four on the back lawn. Janna. Janna, this is Elaine, my wife."

A young woman came skidding around the corner of the cottage with a box of place cards. She was maybe twenty-two, all energy, no brakes. "Hi! Oh my gosh, are you the security Elaine? Kim talks about you ALL the time, like constantly, like I feel like I know you already!"

"She does?" Elaine raised an eyebrow at Kim.

"She does not," Kim said quickly, but her ears went pink, so. So she did.

"Do you need me anywhere specific?" Elaine asked, zipping her jacket up. "Or am I just making loops?"

"Loops are perfect. Check the shed while you're at it, please? Mullen says the latch is loose and he's worried the wind will pop it open. And stay for the ceremony if you want. The flowers, oh, you have to see the flowers, Isa outdid herself. Isa. Come say hi."

A woman in a green apron came up the path with an armful of white roses, twenty-nine years old, hands full, smiling. "Is this the famous wife? Finally. Kim never shuts up about you, we were just saying at the last event, we should get her to come to the staff dinners."

"Okay, everybody stop talking about me," Kim laughed, "and go do your jobs."

Elaine walked the grounds. It was easy work, nice work, the kind of shift where you just move through something beautiful and make sure it stays beautiful. She checked the gates. She checked the fence line. She ended up at the shed, like the shed was a thing she kept circling back to.

The lock was solid, but the hasp screws had worked loose, just like Mullen said. She wiggled them, made a mental note to tell Kim, then pulled the door to make sure it sat shut.

It didn't.

The frame had swelled with rain and settled with age, and the door sat wrong in its frame, and when she pulled it, the old bolt inside, the one nobody used anymore, slid into the catch with a soft click. Click. That was all. Just a little click.

Elaine stood there a second, hand still on the handle.

"Well, shoot," she said out loud.

She pushed. Nothing. She pulled. Nothing. She looked around for Mullen, and the groundskeeper was all the way across the lawn, arguing cheerfully with a caterer about table placement, and there was no way he could hear her, and the wedding music was about to start, and everyone was exactly where they were supposed to be except her.

And here was the thing Elaine noticed, standing locked in a garden shed at a wedding she wasn't invited to, in the middle of the most beautiful Saturday of the month: her first feeling wasn't panic.

Her first feeling was, well. Kim is going to have to come let me out herself.

Elaine tried the door a few more times, like doors appreciate persistence. Nothing. The bolt had seated itself clean in the catch, and the frame had it pinned tight, and nothing more could be done.

"Okay," she told the rake collection. "Okay. This is fine. This is a fine situation."

It was not a fine situation, but talking to rakes was better than talking to nobody, so.

She pulled out her phone. Two bars at noon, right? She'd had two bars at noon. She looked at the screen now and saw the little circle of doom spin where her bars should be. Stone walls, old stone, foot-thick stone, the kind of stone that ate signals for breakfast. She held the phone up over her head. One bar flickered in, flickered out.

"Oh, come on."

She dialed anyway. The call died with a sad little beep.

She tried Kim. Dead. She tried Mullen's number, which she'd gotten off the event sheet that morning. Dead. She typed a text to Kim that said *locked in the shed lol* and then deleted the lol because what if Kim worried, and then re-added it because what if Kim laughed, and then the text just sat there not sending, spinning and spinning like it was butter churning.

"Great. Fantastic."

She heard the music start, way off across the lawn. Strings. Pretty, from a distance. Somewhere out there, four hundred guests were finding their chairs, and Isa's white roses were doing whatever magnificent thing Isa had built out of them, and Kim was in her element with her clipboard and her crooked flower crown, running the whole show.

And Elaine was in a shed with a lawn mower and forty years of somebody's dusty flower pots.

She banged on the door with the flat of her hand. "Hello. Anybody. Hello."

The music swallowed it whole.

* * *

Here's what nobody tells you about being locked somewhere: time gets weird. Elaine sat down on an upturned bucket, because a security guard of nineteen years knows you don't waste energy panicking. You assess. You make a plan. You wait for your window.

Her window was whenever somebody came to the shed, which would be, what, when Mullen locked up for the night? Mullen, who wanted to lock up on time, who was currently arguing about tables. Sunset was around seven this time of year. So seven-ish. Three hours, maybe less.

She could do three hours.

At some point the ceremony happened. She knew because the string music swelled and then there was applause, faint and papery through the stone, like rain on a far-off roof. She pictured it. Kim would be standing at the edge of the lawn with her hands clasped, doing the thing she did at every wedding, where she mouthed the vows along with the couple like she was blessing them personally. Elaine had watched her do it at their own wedding, two years back now, at the stone chapel past the fairgrounds. Kim had cried before anybody. The officiant hadn't even started.

Elaine smiled at the flower pots.

Then the light in the little window went gold, then orange, then that flat gray that isn't quite dark but isn't anything else either. The applause was long gone. Somewhere out there, dinner was happening, toasts, cake, all of it. Elaine's phone showed 6:40 and one bar that came and went like a bad habit.

She tried the text again. It thought about it. It failed.

"Okay," she said, standing up, stretching her knees. "New plan. Yell louder."

She went to the window, the one small square of glass up near the eaves, and cupped her hands, and yelled until her throat felt scratchy. "MULLEN! HELLO! HELLO OUT THERE!"

A bird answered. Some bird. Rude about it, too.

She was sitting back down on the bucket when she heard it. Footsteps. Quick ones, on the gravel path, coming toward the shed, and then a knock on the door, and then a voice she would have known through a foot of stone, through a hundred feet of stone.

"Elaine? Honey, are you in there?"

Elaine was up so fast the bucket went over backwards. "Kim. Kim, oh my gosh, yes, I'm in here, I'm locked in."

"You're WHAT?"

"I locked myself in. The bolt thing, the old bolt inside, it caught when I pulled the door. I've been stuck for three hours. Can you get the padlock?"

There was a pause, and then the sound of Kim crouching down at the hasp, and metal rattling. "The padlock's not even locked, it's just hanging there. Hang on, the hasp screws are... ugh, hold on. There. Okay, it's hanging loose, now what?"

"The door's still stuck, the bolt's in the catch, you have to pull really hard, it's the frame, it's swelled..."

The door cracked open an inch. Grey evening light fell in a stripe across the dusty floor. And there was Kim, flower crown gone crooked, eyes tired