Page 52 of Best Woman
I dance with my dad, and we both do an admirable job pretending it isn’t weird. When the song (“My Girl” by the Temptations, who would not be pleased with the cover) ends, Dad catches the eye of someone behind me and passes me along.
It’s Aiden, slightly sweaty andverytipsy. “Saved a dance for your little brother?” he asks.
“Just don’t step on my shoes,” I say, taking his hand. “I borrowed them from a pop star.”
“We asked the band to sprinkle in a few Hannah G covers,” he says, laying a hand on my waist. “Rachel and I learned the choreography for ‘Love Aneurysm.’ ”
“Congratulations,” I say as we move slowly to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”
“Thanks,” he says. “Can you believe it?”
“Yeah.” I hadn’t been able to, earlier, but here he is. My brother, the husband, all grown up. “I’m really happy for you.”
“Thanks,” he says, flushing. He pulls me closer. “I’m so sorry about Mom, Jules. But I’m also really fucking mad at you. What the fuck?”
“I know,” I say, dropping my head against his shoulder. “I’m sorry and I’m angry and I’m fucking destroyed and god, I did exactly what I didn’t want to do: I made your whole wedding about me.”
“You had some help,” he says. “And believe me, I’m pissed at Mom too, but I can’t deal with any of this right now. It’s my wedding, so I’m gonna dance withmysisterand believe that she has a really good explanation for what just happened and hope she knows we’re gonna figure this shit out when it’s no longer activelymy wedding.”
“I can do that,” I say, nodding against his shoulder.
“But before that, I need you to find the maid of honor so mywifecan stop freaking out.”
“Fuck.”
I find Rachel by the cake, a staggering tower of frosted roses. She gives me a tight, desperate hug and pulls back to look soulfully into my eyes, something sisterly passing between us. I nod in a way that I hope impliesWe’ll talk about it later.I think she gets it, because she switches into business mode. “Have you seen Kim?”
“Not for a while. She…we had…an argument.”
“About what your mom said,” she asks.
“Kind of. I…I fucked up, Rach. Pretty bad. I need to talk to her. I know I can’t make anything better, but I owe her…something. An explanation, or a better apology, or the chance to tell me to fuck off and die.”
Rachel looks confused for a moment, but looks around the room at the hundreds of people she’s entertaining and snaps her fingers. Immediately one of the Rachels is beside her, holding a glass of water and her phone. Rachel sips one while perusing the other. She pinches two fingers, clearly zooming in on something on the screen.
“She’s out on the golf course,” Rachel says, glancing out the window, and then back to her phone. “She must have been walking for a while, she’s all the way out by the seventeenth hole.”
I hold in an unnecessary joke about holes. “Is that a lot, relatively? I don’t know anything about golf.”
“It’s a lot,” says the other Rachel, lips pursed. Rachel Prime glances back out the window, eyes narrowing before her face lights up with inspiration.
“I think you could catch up.”
Ten minutes and a hefty tip to a groundskeeper later, I’m zooming across the grass in a golf cart, seizing up in fear every time I go over a small mound of earth and drop, experiencing the sick weightless feeling you get when an airplane briefly dips and your stomach lifts into your chest. But that feeling remains even as the grass levels out, and in fact, grows the closer I get to the little pin on my phone that Rachel had shared with me. In the blue twilight, the golf course looks lush and endless, stretching out in every possible direction. It’s kind of beautiful,but then I remember that men spend their time here hitting little balls with sticks and wish fervently for it to get bulldozed and turned into a strip mall.
The green grass slopes upward into a hill, and as I crest it the harsh, fluorescent lamplight hits my eyes, blinding me for a second. When I regain my vision, Kim is there, standing beside a small hole in the ground. She is smoking a cigarette and tipping the ashes into said hole and looks completely unsurprised to see me.
I bring the golf cart to an abrupt and juddering stop and lurch down onto the grass, unsteady in my heels. Kim keeps smoking silently as I cross the distance toward her, wondering what I am going to say and increasingly having no fucking clue the closer I get.
“Hi,” I say.
“I told you not to follow,” she says, but she mostly sounds defeated.
I gesture to her cigarette. “Can I have one of those?”
“This was my last one.”
“Oh,” I say. “OK.”
