The Drifter(67)

“Gavin, you know, we always say that the day you met Betsy, it was like a solar eclipse.” He chuckled. “Kind of cool to observe, in some ways, but dark.” Here, he faked a shiver for added emphasis. “Spooky, even. But I know you’ve been through a lot together, some hard times, and, I can only assume, some good ones. I can see that she makes you laugh. She makes you happy, I guess? Can you call it happy? If not, we wouldn’t be here, right? All the way up here in New York? Or are we in Canada yet? You’re happy, I’m happy.”

Teddy tried his best to be nonchalant when he wandered over to Jay and patted him on the back with a hearty thwack.

“Alright, Jay,” said Teddy. “Thanks for that, that sentimental journey.”

The table laughed a bit, in relief no doubt. And Betsy wondered if anyone noticed, or noticed as much as she did, that no one was there to offer quaint or funny stories from her distant past. No one there had seen her climb the kumquat tree in Key West with Ginny, or sat on the back of the sputtering secondhand scooter Betsy had for a single semester before its tiny motor failed, or sat outside Krispy Kreme with her waiting for the hot doughnuts sign to turn on at 4:00 a.m. No one knew about her Golden Girls obsession, or kept track of how many bikes she either lost, forgot to lock, or stole, how many dance parties she’d started in the middle of the night. There was no proud father’s speech. Kathy thought it inappropriate for the mother of the bride to make a toast, so she sat there silently, shifting in her own brand of discomfort and uncertainty, attempting to deflect all of the attention that was directed her way. Jessica stood up to offer a few early work stories, like the time Betsy was in the warehouse digging a print out of storage and knocked over a hanging metal sculpture, which she then convinced the maintenance men to help her “fix” with spray paint.

Jessica was laughing so hard she snorted, overestimating how entertained her audience would be by such highbrow hijinks. “The paint threw the whole thing off balance,” she said, to only muffled laughter. “Trust me, it was a catastrophe.”

Later, when their parents and aunts and uncles went to the hotel bar, Teddy pulled out a couple of fat joints from his suit pocket, and she and Gavin, Teddy, Jessica, and a handful of other friends from New York smoked them under the cover of ancient trees and ran through the vast expanse of dewy grass, tossing a Frisbee across the wide-open lawn, until the light turned from dark gray to deep bluish black.

It was foolish to stay up so late the night before her own wedding, but Betsy didn’t care. When they were making their way back to the hotel, in the dark, through a little stand of trees, Gavin laced his arm through hers and around her back.

“Hello, Mrs. Davis,” he said, leaning down to kiss her.

“You mean, Ms. Young. Or Ms. Davis-Young?”

“Ms. Elizabeth Davis-Young-Sinjin-Smythe, esquire?”

“Sounds about right.”

“What were you thinking about earlier, on the lawn during rehearsal? You seemed worried.”

“Not worried, exactly. Just, you know.”

“I think I know,” he said, nodding in an attempt to assure her. “I just wish you would tell me.”

“Later. We’ll talk about it later.”

THEY WENT TO bed at 1:00 and she’d been flopping around on the sagging, old mattress for nearly two hours.

“Gavin,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”

“Hmm,” he grumbled. “Sort of. What’s up?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“It’s got to be nerves,” he said, putting his hand on her hip and pulling her close. “I’ve got ’em, too. Tomorrow’s a big day. You know you only get married once. Twice? Three times, max.” He leaned in to kiss her neck. Betsy chuckled despite herself. “Any more than that and it’s just embarrassing.”

“I know. You’re right,” she said. “But I’ve got something to tell you. Actually, I have one thing to tell you, and one thing I need to ask you.”

“OK,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Should I be worried? You’re not calling this off, are you?”

“No, no. Of course not.” She paused, debating which would come first, the question or the confession. She led with the latter. “It’s just that I . . . I didn’t have a bachelorette party.”

Gavin propped himself up on his elbow.

“Wait . . . what do you mean?” he asked. “When I went to Atlantic City, with Teddy and the guys from work, you did the spa thing, and a dinner with Jess and Shana and those guys, right?”

“Well, I went to the spa, which was great. But I was alone,” she said.

“And then?”

“And then Jess met me for dinner downtown with Courtney and Shana. We had a drink after and I said I was feeling light-headed from the sauna, and I went home.”

That part was true, mostly. They had a drink, but she wasn’t feeling light-headed, and she sort of went home. First she stopped at the Silver Swan, a dingy German bar in the East 20s, for a bourbon on the rocks. Then she paged Ian on her walk home. He was waiting in front of their building by the time she got there.

He was thinner than when she first met him, almost gaunt, with deepening hollows under his eyes. It was easy for Betsy to separate from him, to say that the years of itinerant pill popping were harder on him than they were on her, and that the bruised crescents under her own eyes weren’t as obvious.