Reception

by Kenzie Jennings

  Lucky for me, I’d disposed of my guilt in time as Nathan, Charlie, and a couple of bearded guys and their bored-looking dates had come over from the table to join Delia and Shay. Charlie had his hand roaming the back of an absolutely stunning woman with lustrous dark hair and eyes like liquid ebony. He laughed as he enjoyed a joke with Delia and Nathan. His date caught my eye, held my gaping stare, capturing it, trapping it alive. Her eyes still on me, she said something in Charlie’s ear, her hand with its crimson fingernails and flash of a sparkling diamond cluster, cupping against his cheek, muffling her words to him alone.

  And right then right there, Jesus fuck, I wanted to hide under the table, dive into the trashcan and bury myself, camouflage myself behind the nearest potted fern, be anywhere but there in that moment. My body was growing sluggishly heavy, and my feet felt as if I’d attached them to weights at first, like I couldn’t move at all. I gritted my teeth and managed to swivel on my heel and made to leave, but Delia called out.

  “Ansley, have you met Nathan’s friends? Come over here, dear heart, and we’ll have introductions all around.”

  I halted there, barely having reached the exit to the lobby, and turned around. I had a quick once over with a shy smile, nodding at each of them, working to memorize faces, avoiding Shay and Charlie, not to mention Charlie’s gorgeous date and her intense scrutiny. (Was that an actual engagement ring she was wearing?) Nathan gave me a subtle smile. The others, they looked as if they’d rather suck paint than socialize with me. It was obviously Shay’s world now; everyone looked like they’d be comfortable in a Ralph Lauren ad. Just wasn’t my scene.

  “I—I’m sorry. I just have to make a quick phone call. Work-related stuff. There’s a signal in the lobby, right?” I said with a nervous chuckle, hoping it didn’t come off as too unsettled. My stomach had just about reached my esophagus and was burning, stuck there.

  Stupid me, I couldn’t avoid the pull of Charlie’s gaze. He shook his head at me, a barely perceptible movement, and his lips thinned shut.

  Shay, apparently, had seen the entire silent conversation he and I were having in that brief moment. Her eyes went round. She sucked in her breath, and Charlie’s beautiful date suddenly heard that. She looked at Shay, and then at me, back at her, then at me once more, trying to make out what was happening there, right there, in that moment.

  Nathan was quick to answer, breaking our little drama. “Wait, I thought you were out of work. Weren’t you laid off?” he said with a smirk. “Didn’t you injure your boss or something?”

  I flashed Shay a scathing look. Hell if I was going to be the guilty one during the entirety of the wedding. Her expression softened. She chewed her lower lip, something she does when she’s caught and unable to sweet talk her way out of it. Delia looked at me with an ever so slight trace of pity in her eyes. I couldn’t take it anymore, so instead of trying to come up with a witty comeback of an excuse, I turned and left, hurrying out into the lobby, hoping I’d not run into another person I really didn’t want to explain my behavior to.

  I’d almost reached the main exit doors from the lobby that was busy with guests checking in and asking questions and a couple of confused-looking desk clerks in resort uniforms, the first hotel desk staff I’d seen since arriving at the place. I made my way over to the desk and then waited patiently in the line.

  For the record, I know this seems like something insignificant, something irrelevant to what was going to happen later. Many of the details in this probably do, but in this, everything matters, even the smallest, mundane detail.

  Like what went on at the front desk.

  The elderly couple in front of me, the two of them prim and preppy in matching pastels and visors, were talking to a desk clerk, and they all seemed tense, strained. The desk clerk, a red-haired, sun-freckled girl, fresh-faced and overwhelmed, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, kept apologizing. To be honest, I wasn’t paying close attention to what they were saying to her, and looking back on it now, I should’ve moved closer to them. In the moment, I was still flustered about what had happened in the dining hall and was worried that any one of them—Charlie, Shay, Delia, hell, even Charlie’s date—was going to come after me with questions I really didn’t want to have to answer.

  If I had paid more attention to what was going on at the desk rather than worrying about my own insecurities and guilt, I probably would’ve gotten a sense as to what to do later. Think about it for a minute though. We just never know what to do because most of the time when the shit goes down, we’re flat out blindsided by it. Even when there are alarm bells ringing away, we never pay close enough attention to them because civility has us shrug such things off rather than follow our primal instinct to flee or fight.

  And sometimes, you just don’t really know what is actually happening.

  I was standing there, keeping an eye on the doorway leading to the dining hall, catching only snippets of their conversation, just words, nothing strung together cohesively. Words like “sorry,” “plastic covering,” “bedding,” “refrigerator,” and “clotting,” don’t usually connect well together, do they?

  I heard all of that, and nothing about it registered as anything but…well, weird. Just that. The fact that I can still form a picture of it is enough for me in the moment, but in hindsight, what would I have really done had I honed in on what was actually being said? They could’ve been talking about an array of different things, from changing bedding to stains on the mattress to chilling food they might have brought to…Oh, fucking hell, who am I kidding, right?

  Then again, I might not have heard anything, really.

  But, hey, old people. I plan on, hopefully, being one of them in the not too distant future, but they’re generally batty. And that’s exactly what I chalked it up to—they were elderly and cuckoo, and I could’ve easily excused it as dementia, expressing one’s batshittery. Wasn’t I just a little bit batty, too? Had I heard what I thought I’d heard?

  When it was my turn, the couple turned away, and the woman collided right into me. She laughed and squeezed my arm. Then she apologized with a friendly smile and a “Ran right into you, didn’t I?” I didn’t recognize either of them, but since the only ones who were at the resort were guests of the wedding, I naturally assumed they were from groom’s side of the family.

  I watched the two of them head off in the direction of the lobby entrance as the woman clasped her husband’s hand in her own. They stopped just before they reached the doors to say hello to another older couple who’d just come in, both sweaty and loaded down with travel gear and a bulky, but beautifully wrapped, wedding present.

  The desk clerk coughed to get my attention. “May I help you, ma’am?” she asked.

  I turned back to her, offering her what I hoped was a breezy smile. “Yeah, what’s the best place around here where I can get a signal? There’s barely one bar on my phone in here. I thought there was supposed to be Wifi, too.”

  Before the desk clerk could answer, I felt a squeeze, a bit of firm pressure on my shoulder, signaling me to stop what I was doing. “Talk to you for a minute, Ans?” Shay said softly from behind. I felt myself being propelled around as she led me to a corner of the lobby that poured into a tiny hallway with a dainty cushioned chair and two doors announcing men’s and women’s facilities.

  “I was asking because I was just curious…Why isn’t there any reception around here?” I asked Shay just before she roughly pushed me through the swinging door of the ladies’ room.

  FIVE

  I stumbled inside, barely catching myself against the air dryer on the wall. I whirled around, right back into her. “Jesus, Shay. What wrong with you?”

  I knew what it was though. She really didn’t have to tell me; I’d read it all over her face. I supposed I should’ve felt some normal amount of guilt at any rate. Maybe it was karma, meant to be my fate from here on out. After all, I’ve been in love with a married man for a while now. “Taken” men would inevitably have to
be my troublesome weakness.

  Shay latched onto it quickly, furiously. “Are you fucking joking? What do you think you’re doing?” she hissed at me, her face mere inches from mine. She then checked underneath the stalls to see if anyone was there and had heard the commotion coming from the two of us. Quite a pair, we were. Once she saw the coast was clear, she was right in my face.

  “I saw the two of you looking at each other like you had some dirty, little secret. He’s engaged, Ansley. You are not going to do this on my day. My day. You are not.”

  Her breath smelled of bananas and coffee tinged with a trace of something else, something dark and salty-crusted. Her teeth had been methodically whitened, probably a professional job courtesy of mama Card. Dad would’ve never dished out the bread for such a…what he’d probably call…a “frivolous” expense like that, not even for his favorite. He and Mom had been smug about their frugality throughout the whole ordeal, leaving much of the cushy expenses up to the Cards, who were into keeping up with appearances, something my family tended to eschew. Frankly, I wondered how much Mom and Dad had invested all in all for their own daughter’s wedding—Dad’s pride and joy; Mom’s source of constant comparison.

  “Listen, it wasn’t like he made it evident,” I said. Seriously. No indication. No apparent guilt. “You know, you might even ask him one-on-one if this is a regular thing with him. I get the feeling he’s got a few on the side besides a lousy one-nighter with the likes of little ol’ me.”

  Shay never likes it when I take a dig at myself, so I took a shot and continued with my downplay. Anything to cream character. “Okay. It was wrong, Shay. A stupid moment of weakness. Leon warned me that destructive behavioral patterns often breed other destructive behavioral patterns, if anything, to mask the one that started it.”

  She clenched her teeth, readying herself for her own retort, something biting about my therapy no doubt. An apologetic silver-haired lady in a sleek orange sheath dress opened the ladies’ room door wide to lead in a chain of giggly little girls, no more than five or six years old, curly-haired, prissy ducklings. Shay and I crowded near the sinks, watching the flock of them in silence, smiles on. The silver-haired woman pointed two of the girls into one stall, reminding them to lock the door, and she led the remaining one, probably the youngest of the bunch, into a stall with her.

  “Can we talk about this later? When we’re not surrounded by wedding guests and their kids?” I whispered, keeping my head close to hers. “You have to get ready, don’t you? Isn’t that a bride thing? Don’t we have hair appointments?” Truthfully, it wasn’t something I was looking forward to, being stuck in a hair salon with Shay, her best friend, our mom, and Delia Card, but it was all I had in the moment.

  “Yeah, we do,” breathed Shay. It came out forcefully, like a big sigh. “You might want to take their spa deal, too,” she said, grimacing down at my hands. “Christ, Ans, you’ve got to stop chewing on your nails like that. Your cuticles look like you’ve been mauling them.”

  It was always something. If not the nails, the clothes; if not the clothes, the body; if not the body, the hair, and so on. “It keeps me from swallowing the whole bottle of pills I brought,” I joked halfheartedly. “It’s either my fingernails or my delicious babies.”

  “Are you serious? You brought your—I thought you were off them. What the hell, Ans? What kind of a rehab facility lets—”

  I interrupted her before she could get me totally wound. “I’m tapering. It’s fine… So is Charlie’s fiancée coming along with us, too, then? Is that why you’re freaking out about it?” Anything. Anything to get off topic. I was so goddamned tired of having to explain myself to family who refused to pay attention to me.

  “Her name is Nabhitha,” Shay snapped. “She happens to be one of the most gracious people I’ve ever met.”

  “Nabhitha. Swank name for a swank lady.”

  Shay pursed her lips into a tight line. She inhaled deeply, let out her breath in a long exhale of air, and said, “I can’t—I can’t believe you and Charlie…It’s like you don’t even—” She stopped, chewed on her lower lip.

  “Don’t even what?” I prodded.

  “Never mind.”

  “Don’t even what, Shay?”

  “It’s not important.”

  I wasn’t about to let that go though. “No, no. You don’t get to drop it now,” I said. “Say whatever it is you were gonna say.”

  She hesitated before speaking. She was choosing her words delicately, like I’d break if I heard it. “It’s like you don’t even care about outcomes,” she said softly. “You don’t care about what happens to other people. Even more, you don’t care about yourself, Ans. It’s like you’ve lost all self-respect. You just do whatever suits you at the time, and you don’t care if it hurts anyone.”

  Granted, it may have always seemed that way from the other angle, of that I’m sure, but it was utter bullshit. It wasn’t true from my end. It wasn’t true at all. Before I could come to my own defense, we heard the toilet flush in one of the occupied stalls. There was a little whisper of encouragement, followed by another flush. The stall doors then unlatched and the little girls and the woman in the orange dress came out, the little ones giving us curious glances, their chaperone apologetic as she herded them to the sinks.

  Shay nodded in the direction of the door, signaling for us to go outside. I followed her out into the little hallway outside the lobby facilities. She then turned and looked at me directly.

  “Be honest, Ansley. Are you planning on testing Mom and Dad while you’re here because the last thing I want to have happen on my wedding day is for there to be tension,” she said. “I invited you to be in the wedding because I felt that you were really trying hard. I want no outbursts, no drama, no theatrics, Ans. It’s bad enough that we still argue about Nathan. I just can’t stomach any of that stuff right now.”

  “I know. I know,” I said. My face was burning. My stomach, flip-flopping.

  “Mom especially can’t take any drama like that, ever since—”

  “Since what?”

  Shay hesitated before continuing. “She had a minor heart attack. She had a decent recovery, but the cardiologist said her heart won’t be as strong as it had been,” she said. “It was awhile ago, right around the time Simon split up with you.”

  And suddenly, everything else seemed utterly inconsequential. “How come no one told me this?”

  “Dad said he’d tried to get in touch, but he couldn’t reach you, so I tried. He was so upset. I’ve never seen him hurt like that. I caught him crying once on the patio,” she said. “I even emailed you about it, Ans. You used to respond to emails, even the ones Mom used to send out. You remember? The ones with the links to the cats behaving badly videos?”

  I managed to smile, all things considered. “And the jumping baby goats.”

  “Oh my God, those goats!”

  We shared a little chuckle, just enough to keep us in the moment. Then we just stood there, unsure of what to say, how to feel, how to continue.

  “I’m so sorry, Shay,” I said softly. “I wasn’t thinking of anyone else. I don’t shut people off like that though. I was just—”

  “You were just what?”

  “I was just broken. I needed to be away from everyone.”

  “Well, that didn’t do Mom any good, did it?”

  “Apparently, it didn’t.” I didn’t know what else to say, what else to do, how to respond. “I should talk to them. Maybe when all of this is done…”

  She nodded primly. Then after a thoughtful minute, she said, “I can’t believe it though, that you— ”

  And there she went again. Choppy thoughts, implications, accusations, leaving me waiting for a straightforward response. It’s what she did sometimes. “Yes? That I what?” I said.

  Shay tossed me a look. “Seriously, Ansley. Charlie’s Nathan’s best man. I thought you didn’t do clichés.”

  “The best man’s a cliché? Yeah, okay, I sup
pose he is, and yeah, I did him. Done did him good, girl.”

  “Shut up,” she said. “It’s not funny. It’s so wrong.”

  “But it felt so riiiiiiight,” I softly sang.

  Finally, she snickered, and I almost joined in when the woman in the orange dress emerged behind me, shuffling the train of little princesses out of the ladies room. Shay gave the woman a perfectly bridelike, dazzling smile, showing off those pearly whites. Since my back was to the door, I made a face at her, and then played it off by waving at the little girls, who kept giggling amongst themselves.

  As soon as they’d left, Shay went dark and somber. I took a step back at her sudden change in temperament.

  “We’re not still fighting, are we, even after a laugh?” I asked, offering up a hopeful grin.

  “Be honest with me,” she said, her voice low, “I thought you were off the meds. Isn’t that what landed you in rehab to begin with?”

  “I went over and over this with you, but the wedding…it’s turned off everything around you. Such selective listening,” I said, but when Shay put on her I’m-about-to-throw-a-fit grimace, I softened my words. “Look, I know the joke was stupid. You know me. I’m a smartass. But yes, in all seriousness, no jokes. I told you I am still on the meds. I have to taper off slowly. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to be here on your…on your important day.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was so caught up in all of this, everything here, I guess I must’ve missed that part.”

  “Well, yeah, kid, you’re getting married. You’re allowed to be distracted. It’s practically expected of you. It says so in the bride’s handbook.”

  Shay’s mouth rounded in an “O” in melodramatic surprise. “There’s a handbook? How was I not aware of this?” she said with a grin.

  “Page 290, chapter twelve, and if memory serves, it states, ‘The bride must always be distracted with wedding shit that won’t matter once she’s married.’”