Once the ceremony was complete, there was always an easing in my mother’s tension. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when she joined me during dinner as I stood guarding the display of M & J cupcakes on the cake table. While guests rarely messed with a wedding cake, something about cupcakes brought out serious grabby hands, and not just in children. Until the pictures were taken, though, they were off limits, which meant body blocking them while saying “Not yet!” in a cheerful, yet firm, voice to anyone who tried to approach. It was one of my least favorite jobs, and one William loved. But he was tied up taking over for a queasy bartender until backup arrived, so it fell to me.
“Did you see how many people ditched those penny cards?” my mother said, her eyes moving over the crowd in front of us. “Talk about dishonoring the dead.”
“DABs are always a mistake,” I told her, as a flower girl, carrying a full plate of steak and pasta, started for the cupcakes. When I stepped forward, she veered off, her dress hem dragging on the carpet behind her. “If any idea is good, we’ve already thought of it.”
She looked at me, smiling, proud. “Listen to you. Spoken like a real wedding planner.”
“Or a future cucumber seller,” I replied. “And I’m still knocking off early tonight. You promised.”
“I know, I know.” She reached behind us, picking up a stray crumpled napkin and tucking it in her pocket. “I also know I’ve been lucky to have you working with us these last few years. Although it’s not like I really gave you a choice.”
“I am getting another job once I start college,” I told her.
“God, I hope so.” She shuddered theatrically. “I cannot be responsible for sucking someone else into a lifetime of this business. I already feel bad enough about William.”
I looked over at the bar across the room, where at that moment the man in question was chatting away while salting the rim of a margarita, two older women in jewel tone dresses hanging on his every word. “I don’t think he minds it so much.”
She smiled, seeing this too. “Oh, he does. He just can’t do anything else, like me.”
This was big talk, and I was used to it. My mom and William always discussed the business as if it, too, was a bad relationship they couldn’t wait to break off. And yet, they kept coming back, bickering over choices of clients and laughing at inside jokes I’d never understand. The longest, most successful relationship either of them had ever had was with this business and each other, and they knew it. Maybe it wasn’t true love, but it worked. Somehow.
Finally, Margy and Josef cut the cake, each feeding the other a bite (skipping the smashing of it in each other’s faces, which we as a company lobbied against, always). With the dessert table fair game, I went to the bathroom, where I checked all the toilets for problems and paper and wiped down the sink counter. Then it was back through the ballroom and outside to the patio, where a few kids were running around on the dance floor as the DJ got ready to start playing the real music. I swung by the nearby bar, picking up two waters, then delivered one to him, asking if he needed anything. When he said no, I walked over to the steps that led to the beach, where someone had left a couple of little plates and a wine glass with a napkin stuffed into it. I was just putting them on a tray table when I heard the early first notes of a Motown song. By the time I turned around, people were already coming through the doors, following the music.
There are always phases to dancing at receptions. Usually kids and older people are first to take the floor, due to a lack of self-consciousness. By the second song, you could count on a few of the more tipsy people to join them, often in the form of a clump of girls, all out shaking it together. Younger couples were next, followed by single guys, who tended to need some coaxing to join in. Eventually, though, if the drinks were flowing and the DJ decent, you had a packed floor of all types. William always said the best part of weddings was the dancing, and I had to agree with him. People just stopped caring. One night away from the norm, with the people you know best or barely at all. If you couldn’t cut loose then, when could you?
I edged past a circle of bridesmaids bumping hips, then an older couple doing some complicated spin-out-and-back footwork, my eye on a nearby ledge cluttered with empty champagne glasses. I was so focused I didn’t even notice the young groomsman from earlier approaching until he was right beside me.
“Want to dance?”
I turned, taking him in: the short hair, those blue eyes, the black bow tie I’d picked up earlier loose, but not undone, around his neck. “No, thanks.”
He looked surprised and—I realized, horrified—embarrassed. “Oh. Okay.”
“I’m working,” I said quickly, stepping over his last syllables. Now we were both blushing. “For the wedding planner. So I can’t—”
“Oh, right.” His face relaxed. “I didn’t realize—”
“I know, it’s fine.” I looked at the floor, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear. “Thank you anyway.”
He smiled then, and there was something about the way it changed his face, taking it from cute to outright charming, that suddenly made me wish I could say yes. To a boy, and a dance, and also to having that chance, one night, to be away from everything. We stood there a minute, until the bridesmaids nearby opened up their circle, whooping, and pulled him in. I walked over to the ledge I’d seen earlier, collecting the glasses and putting them on a nearby tray. Underneath one of the chairs was another penny card, face down, and I picked it up, rubbing my finger over the coin. When I looked back at the dance floor, the boy and the bridesmaids were gone.
That could have been it. And sometimes, on my worse nights when I couldn’t sleep for all the tears, I wished that it was. Because then, Ethan wouldn’t even have been Ethan to me, but just a guy I said no to at one wedding among so many in a long summer. Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing to lose.
As it was, a few minutes later I stopped by to check in with William and my mother, who were standing off to the side of the dance floor, watching one of Margy’s aunts dance suggestively against a heavyset man in a sport coat.
“The power of champagne,” he said as the woman turned, bumping her ample rear against the man’s hip. “She’s told me twice tonight she never drinks it, each time with a mostly empty glass in her hand.”
“Weddings are a different world,” I replied, using one of his favorite phrases.
“Indeed they are.” The couple were now outright grinding each other. “And right now, I want to go home.”
“My eyes,” my mother said in a low voice, fake-horrified at the spectacle. “I’m too old for this.”
“They’re senior citizens!” William said, and they both cackled.
“And I was promised an early night off,” I said, looking at my mom. “Can I go?”
“Wait, Louna gets to leave? How is that fair?”
“Because she’s seventeen and paid poorly,” my mom told William. “Her bosses are awful people.”
“I have heard that,” he agreed. He smiled at me. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever I want?”
“Look at our girl, single and ready to mingle at the beach. She’s acting like a real teenager!” He beamed at me, then looked at my mom. “I so hoped this day would come.”
“Stop,” my mom said, pretending to fan her eyes. “I’ll get emotional.”
“Shut up, both of you,” I said, and they laughed again. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You are young and so is the night! Carpe diem!” William called out after me as I walked across the patio.