Wedding Season Read Online Free Page B

self-conscious and awkward in the company of people I don’t know well, or in situations where attention is focused on me, or at large public functions. Weddings, for example. “Henry, I can’t—”
    “No backsies, Joy. You promised.”
    “Oh, sweets,” Joan says. “You’ll be marvelous. Cheer up. Watch me tie the cherry stem into a knot with my tongue. You always like that.”
    Someone grabs me around the waist, and I turn to see Miel, and Maud skipping up behind her. Miel is a wispy girl, slender and small with a narrow, sallow pixie face and pale, lank red hair. She’s an artist, the very picture of an artist, in fact: fey and dreamy, with a tubercular-orphan quality that makes us covetous and protective of her. Maud calls herself our diversity quota girl; she’s Korean—second-generation Korean-American, I think. She’s round and cheerful and sanguine as a farm wife in a Victorian novel, part hip-hop tomboy and part Hello Kitty kitsch princess. Tonight she has a dozen rhinestone barrettes holding her hair so that it sticks out in little tufts, and when she speaks, the tufts quiver like antennae.
    “Where’s our table?” Maud pulls at one of my curls. “I’m starving.”
    “Where’s Erica?” asks Miel.
    “Maybe she and Brian decided to elope.” Joan smirks. The idea of Erica—that quintessential Upper East Side debutante currently making her modest entrance—on the connubial lam is unlikely and amusing. Erica roomed with me and Henry our first year at Vassar; the other girls on our floor called us The Odd Triple, which was apt. Henry, being Henry, adored Erica, and made us a team for the year. I was more ambivalent; it wasn’t until several years after graduation and a good year after the founding of our girls’ night that I was able to take Erica on her own terms. Finally, Erica was just so obliviously and unapologetically and sweetly her blonde, blithe, sweater set-wearing, single-strand-of-pearls self that to judge her for it seemed to miss the point completely, and I gave in to just liking her. She surprised me by becoming a very successful literary agent at a large commercial firm, and has since used her contacts to incredibly kind and generous ends for many of her friends, including me. Erica is simply a happy girl, and perhaps the only perfectly self-accepting person I know. Tonight, however, she is the locus of my anxiety and irritation, for the simple and only reason that she is the first wedding on my list; next weekend I will be her bridesmaid.
    Erica, who has been in consultation with the maître d’, waves us toward a table. The girls collect their coats and march. Henry brings up the rear, singing “Here Comes the Bride” loudly enough for the other customers to take notice, swiveling their heads around and peering at the group. I raise my hands helplessly to Luke, who laughs.
    “I remember the first time you came in here.” He touches my wrist with one finger.
    “That was almost six years ago. You’ve been here too long.”
    “You’ve
been here too long. Find another goshdarn bar. And keep those ladies quiet, will you?”
    My table has just erupted into squealing laughter. I nod at him and go to join my noisy, my old, my dear old friends, with whom I’ve been coming to this goshdarn bar once a month for almost six years. Which is kind of nice.
    E RICA IS SANDWICHED between Joan and Henry on one side of the table, flushed and giggling. Maud and Miel shift over to make room for me, and Miel knocks over a full water glass. No one misses a beat; we just grab napkins and keep talking. Miel is as dependable as a national park geyser in this respect, guaranteed to make at least one mess per meal, and on the scale of things, this is minor. Once, getting up to go to the bathroom, she knocked over the entire table. Henry always says that what Miel lacks in coordination, she makes up for in clumsiness.
    Erica reveals to me the source of their uproar a moment before; she holds up a