Flying Solo(17)

Now Nick was quiet for a minute. The door opened and closed; a woman and a little boy came in and went up to the counter to order; a girl with a backpack slung over her shoulder walked out. “Nah. Believe me, you don’t want to get married if the marriage you’re going to have is not the same marriage as the one you’d like to have.”

“Boy, that’s it exactly.” She picked at the edge of her shirt. “Anyway, I called it off.”

“When?”

“Three weeks before it was supposed to happen.”

He whistled. “Whoa. I’m sure that was wrenching and everything, but undoing a wedding also sounds like the biggest pain in the ass ever.”

“Yeah. Once he took a couple of days to get drunk and hate me, Chris was very helpful, probably about half because he’s a genuinely lovely person and half because he wanted to see if we could get any money back. Spoiler alert, by the way: not much. I canceled the hall and the band and the flowers. He canceled the food and the bartenders and the minister. My mother made the cancellation calls to the guests. We divided up sending back the gifts. I had to deal with the dress, obviously.”

“Did you get your money back for that?”

“It’s a funny thing,” she told him, holding up one finger. “It turns out that when you have a wedding dress made, there’s no backsies. So you either keep it, or you let them keep it and try to resell it, and you lose most of your money. Which, in my case, was a bunch of thousands of dollars.”

“Laurie,” he said as he fidgeted with his coffee cup, “that is a racket.”

“It is a racket. My friend Erin back home is planning her wedding right now, and there was a printer that she had used for these fancy party invitations once and they wanted to charge her six times as much for her wedding invitations, which were basically the same. And she asked why, and the guy said it was ‘the market.’?”

“So you have to hope somebody buys your dress?”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t want them to get the best of me with this ridiculous system, so I just paid for it and kept it.”

“So you have this dress now?”

She nodded. “I have the dress. I am not at all sure I’m ever going to get any use out of the dress, but I have the dress. Maybe I’ll wear it on Halloween sometime. Otherwise, it will decay in my closet at home, and one day, they can bury me in it.”

He tilted his head. “So you would be a very old lady who was buried in a forty-year-old wedding dress?”

“Exactly.”

He considered this. “Huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing. That’ll show ’em?”

“Hey, whose side are you on?”

“I’m on your side. And the dress is not going to decay in your closet. I’m sure you’re going to use it when the time comes, and you’re going to look great.” He drank his coffee, and they just looked at each other for a minute, a dark curl of his hair falling onto his forehead.

She put her cup down. “Wait. How are you hot now?”

He laughed—he cackled, really—and he slid his jacket off and put it over the arm of the chair. “I’m not, believe me.”

“I’m not sure you’re the expert.”

“Don’t take my word for it. I had a woman on a dating app a few weeks ago message me to say I was a six, but if I cut my hair and went to the gym I might be as high as an eight.”

“Why would she tell you this?”

“I don’t have a clue. I think getting information you didn’t ask for is one of the basic features of dating apps. Whatever you actually want to know about people, it’s not what you’re going to find out. I asked a woman what her favorite book was once, and she said, ‘Yoga.’?”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t ask people what their favorite book is, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because even though you, in particular, ask that question in your capacity as a non-jerk, it’s a question a lot of jerks ask, because they want to use it to develop a cultural profile of you that they can work to adjust later.”

“Is that true?”

“Absolutely. I once told a guy I loved The Firm and he told me that if I loved legal thrillers, I should read the best legal thriller of all: the Bible.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Neither do I. But I do know you are not a six. You are hot now, and I resent the fact that you became that way while I was gone.”

“Maybe we’re thinking about it wrong. Maybe I was always hot.”

“You were not,” she said. “You were cute and nice. That’s different from hot.”

“Well, you thought I was hot then.”

“How do you know?”

“You dated me.”

“I dated you because you were cute and nice. I was sixteen, and you were cute and nice. ‘Cute and nice’ is what you aspire to date when you’re sixteen and you’re a complete dork, everybody knows that.”

“You were not a complete dork.”

“Oh, I was.”

“You really were not.”

“How do you know?”

“I dated you.”