The Office of Historical Corrections(7)
“Why weren’t you?”
“He went to college. Then he went to grad school. Then he went to Togo.”
“Where were you?”
“Here,” Dori says. “Always here.”
* * *
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There is a shrieking and then deep laughter from the other end of the bar. The blue bridesmaid, whose left breast is now dangerously close to escaping her tank top, has been joined by reinforcements, and they are dragging over a man from the table across the bar. He is muscled and burly, too big to be dragged against his will, but plays at putting up a fight before he falls to his knees in mock submission, then stands and walks toward their table, holding the bra above his head like a trophy belt. He tosses the bra on the table in front of Dori and tips his baseball cap.
“Ma’am,” he says to Dori’s wide eyes, “excuse my being forward, but I understand it’s your bachelorette party, and your friends over here have obliged me to provide you with a dance.”
For a moment Rena thinks this might be orchestrated, this man a real entertainer, Dori’s friends better at conspiracy than she would have given them credit for, but then the man wobbles as he crouches over Dori, gyrating clumsily while trying to unbutton his own shirt, breathing too close to her face and seeming at any moment like he might lose balance and fall onto her. Dori looks to the bartender for salvation, some sort of regulatory intervention, but the bartender only grins and switches the music playing over the bar loudspeakers to something raunchy and heavy on bass. The bridesmaids begin laughing and pulling dollar bills from their purses. Before they close a circle around the table, Rena sees her chance. She is up and out the door before anyone can force her to stay.
* * *
? ? ?
It’s a short dark walk back to the hotel, where the bar is closed and its lights are off, but someone is sitting at it anyway. Rena starts to walk past him on her way to the elevators but realizes it’s one of the groomsmen. Michael from DC. He was on her connecting flight, one of those small regional shuttles sensitive to turbulence. He is tall and sinewy, and before she knew they were heading to the same place, she had watched him with a twinge of pity, folding himself into the too-small space of his plane seat a few rows ahead of hers.
“Early night?” Rena asks as she walks toward him.
“Let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve been to a bachelor party with a pastor present.”
“Cake and punch in a church basement?”
“Scotch and cigars in a hotel penthouse. Still boring as all get-out. JT and I lived together in college, and he used to tell me he was from the most boring place in the country, but I didn’t believe him until now.”
“So you thought you’d liven Indiana up by sitting at an empty bar with a flask?”
“You never know when something interesting might happen.”
“At least you got to change out of your rainbow color. Or were you guys not assigned colors?”
“We only have to wear them tomorrow.”
“Men. Always getting off easy.”
“Easy? Do you know how hard it is to find an orange vest?”
“Ooh, you’re orange. Have you spent much time with your bridal counterpart?”
“Only met her briefly.”
“See if you can get out of her what she did.”
“What she did?”
“You have seven color choices; you don’t put a redhead in orange unless you’re angry at her. Girl is being punished for something. Must be some gossip.”
“So far most of the gossip I’ve heard at this wedding has been about you.”
“I only know one person here. Whatever you’ve heard isn’t gossip; it’s speculation.”
“Fair enough,” he says. “You want to finish this upstairs? Less to speculate about.”
So now there will be something to gossip about. Maybe it will put Dori’s mind at ease if Rena appears to be taken for the weekend. Michael tastes like gin and breath mints, and he is reaching for the button on her jeans before the door is closed. Rena affixes herself to his neck like she is trying to reach a vein; she is too old to be giving anyone a hickey, she knows, but she is determined right now to leave a mark, to become part of the temporary map of his body, to place herself briefly along his trajectory as something that can be physically noted, along with the smooth and likely professionally maintained ovals of his fingernails, the birthmark that looked almost like the shape of Iowa, the very slight paunch of his unclothed belly. She clasps a fist in his hair, which is thick and full, but they are at that age now, a few years older than the bride and groom, youth waving at them from the border to an unknown territory. Rena can tell that if she saw Michael again in two years, he would be starting to look like a middle-aged man, not unattractive or unpleasant looking, but it has snuck up on her, that time of her life when age-appropriate men remind her of her father, when you go a year without seeing a man and suddenly his hair is thinned in the middle, his beard graying, his body softer. So she is saying yes please to right now, to the pressure of his palm along her arm and his teeth on her earlobe, and she is surprised by how much she means it.
* * *
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Sleeping in someone else’s bed doesn’t stop the nightmares. Rena observes this almost empirically—it has been a while since she has spent the night with anyone and a very long while since she slept soundly. It is her job to go to the places where the nightmares are. It is not a job a person takes if full nights of sleep are her priority. Plus, weddings are not easy. Rena has missed a lot of weddings by being strategically or unavoidably out of the country. The only time she was actually in a wedding, she was the maid of honor. It was her little sister Elizabeth’s wedding, autumn in Ohio, a small ceremony, a marriage to a man both of them had grown up with, Connor from the house around the corner. Connor who used to mow their lawn and rake their leaves and shovel their snow. Rena’s dress was gold. Her mother worried about the amount of cleavage and her grandmother said, Her baby sister’s getting married before her; let her flash whatever she needs to catch up. For a week before the wedding, her sister had been terrified of rain, and Rena had lied about the weather report to comfort her, and the weather turned out to be beautiful, and her sister turned out to be beautiful, and Connor turned out to be the man who, a year later, suspected Elizabeth of cheating because he’d seen a repairman leave the house and she’d forgotten to tell him anyone was coming that day, and so he put a bullet through her head. She lived. Or someone lived: it was hard to match the person in the rehab facility with the person her sister had been.