At 9:47, despite the strict ten p.m. sharp ending on the schedule, the dance floor remained crowded. Still, I took no comfort in the fact I’d been right talking to Jilly earlier. The day had been unexpectedly hot for the end of April, and the combination of stress, sunshine, and multiple hours on my feet had taken a toll. I didn’t want to go to Bendo, much less make the effort required to be “out there,” with two boys I didn’t even know. And I definitely didn’t want to dance. Which was why, when Ambrose Little emerged from the back of a rather sloppy-looking Electric Slide line, spotted me, and beckoned, I only shook my head.
This was a no-brainer, but not because of anything to do with him. The Golden Rule of working a Natalie Barrett Wedding: remember your place. It wasn’t unusual for clients, over the course of many months of planning, to develop a certain dependency on us. Huge life events that were fraught with emotion often led to displaced feelings. However, “Nobody wants to look at their pictures later and see their wedding planner acting like a guest,” my mom always reminded extra employees we took on from time to time for bigger events. “If we don’t stay out of frame, we haven’t done our job right.”
So I wasn’t surprised to be asked to dance. It happened, especially at open bar events. I was, however, not expecting him to respond to my no by shaking his own head, then walking right over and sticking his hand out to take mine.
“Dancing is healing,” he said, opening his palm wide to me as the music faded out and another song began. “Let’s heal.”
“No, thank you,” I said.
He wiggled his fingers wildly, as if imitating a sea anemone might suddenly sway my opinion.
“Thanks, but no,” I told him, switching up my three allowed words in this situation.
“Ambrose!” a girl in a short pink dress, her now bare feet crisscrossed with the evidence of previously worn sandals, hollered from the floor. “Get over here! We need you for the conga line!”
“Hear that?” he said to me. “Conga! You gotta get in on this.” When again I shook my head, he sighed loudly, then bent over with his hands on his knees, as if my response was now so tragic it had knocked the wind out of him. After a second, he lifted his head, then one hand, busting out the sea anemone move again. “Conga. Healing. Let’s go.”
“No, thanks,” I told him.
People were starting to form the line now, stumbling as they grabbed on to each other, laughing and flushed. If there was a benchmark of the Beginning of the End of a reception, this was it. Ambrose looked over, grinned, then turned back to me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t have to squeeze tight.”
“You won’t have to squeeze at all,” I said. “Because the answer is still no.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be working this event?”
“I am.”
“So you should dance, then.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Why?”
The last thing I felt like doing was getting into the parameters of my job with a clumsy, wavering conga line approaching. “I’m not a guest, I’m an employee. We don’t dance. We work.”
He considered this briefly. “Okay, then I’m asking you to be my date. You’re off duty.”
“That’s not how it works either,” I told him.
“Man! You are tough!” He shook his head, that curl I couldn’t seem to not focus on bobbing. The conga line was now winding around a nearby chair, a red-faced man with a cigar clamped in his mouth leading it. “So what you’re saying is that you are never going to dance with me right now, no matter how I plead or beg you, even if conga is involved.”
“Correct,” I said.
“Really?” He made a face. “Shoot. I hate not having what I want.”
This was such a weird thing for him to say—arrogant, honest—that I found myself, for the first time, without a set response at hand. But as the conga line came up behind him, the girl in pink letting out a whoop as she reached for his belt buckle, I almost wished for a final beat to address this thought, one I still had myself, more often than I could admit.
I hate not having what I want.
“Don’t we all,” I said quietly, as the line blurred past me, weaving through the tables. And just like that, I reached the point where the whole thing was too much color and life and laughter, and all I could do was turn and walk away.
CHAPTER
3
ETHAN ASKED me to dance at a wedding, too, and I said no. The first time.
But that was later in the story, this one I’d once told others so eagerly, and now could only repeat to myself, in my own head. You’d think in retrospect time would become linear, as if distance from events forced them to take their proper places. But something like this, I’d learned, was more fluid, as if the story was always being retold, in progress, whether you could bear to listen or not.
I was doing it again, jumping around. But it was so hard to start at the beginning when you knew how it would end.
It all happened at the Margy Love Wedding, the previous summer. My mother did not like doing out of town weddings and rarely took them on, maintaining that she was only as good as her vendors, which were all local. Margy Love’s grandpa, however, was dear friends with William’s mother. As the original benefactor of the business, Miss May—as she was known—had a certain clout even my mother couldn’t deny. Aged eighty and in assisted living, she rarely asked for favors. But when she did, the answer was always yes.
So that August, after ten months of long-distance planning with Margy (in D.C.) and her mother (in California) we packed up for a weekend in the beach town of Colby (where they’d vacationed as a family every summer of Margy’s life). The venue was only about three hours from our house door to door, and, actually, not a bleak, unpopulated place where weddings had never happened before. Not that you could tell this by how stressed my mom was or the amount of stuff she insisted we bring (three vans’ worth, one of us driving each) to ensure she’d have everything she required. My mom was wound pretty tight as a rule, at least when it came to work. But even I had rarely seen her so tense and snappy, which was why, when we finally pulled out caravan-style from the front of the house, I was happy to have the ride all to myself with just the radio for company.
Still, I missed Jilly, who had been planning to come along with me and hang out on the beach or in my room while I worked. This would have been a first for her, an entire weekend away from her family, and we’d both been looking forward to it. It wasn’t easy for the Bakers to do without her and juggle their two Cheese Therapy food trucks (they sold gourmet grilled cheese and the richest, creamiest tomato soup I’d ever tasted), which was why she usually ended up being the substitute hands-on parent to one or all of her siblings. This weekend, though, they’d promised her a pass in return for a busy summer of ferrying the twins and Crawford around, as well as changing endless diapers of Bean’s. Two days earlier, however, Cheese Therapy had been one of only twenty trucks selected for a food truck rodeo at the state capital celebrating small local businesses. It was a big deal, and they needed all hands on deck, so our getaway was out.