“You have something in your teeth.”
The bride’s face falls. “But I haven’t eaten since this morning.”
The bride walks to the bathroom mirror, which is as tall as the room itself. She picks at her teeth as she says, “I’ve seriously been going around all day with food in my teeth and nobody said a word?”
“Maybe nobody noticed.”
“Oh, trust me, the people here notice everything.”
She leans closer to the mirror, picks harder.
“Gary’s mother has noticed that my dress tonight is ‘very young,’ which is code for her saying I look like a godless whore. And Marla, my future sister-in-law, has noticed how expensive this hotel is, though she won’t ever say it. She’ll just list off the price of every single item on the menu until we all want to scream.”
Lila backs away from the mirror. “Do you have any floss?”
“I seem to have forgotten the floss.”
Lila looks around the bathroom. “They’re supposed to have everything here.”
Phoebe helps her search through the contents of the most beautiful wicker basket she has ever seen, but there is only ginseng lotion. Hibiscus bath salts. Thyme bodywash. By the time she looks up, the bride is at the phone.
“Can you bring floss to the Roaring Twenties?” the bride says. “Yes, that’s fine. I’ll wait. Thank you.”
“Why are you having him bring it here?” Phoebe asks when she hangs up.
“Let’s wait on the balcony” is all the bride says, like they are a team now and their only job is to restore Lila’s teeth to their perfect condition. But when Phoebe doesn’t budge, she adds, “I think you can hold off on eternity for thirty minutes. Oh, hey, there’s the bird watching kit I bought for everybody.”
She picks up a pair of binoculars from the desk and ignores the pamphlet about North Atlantic birds.
“Thirty minutes?” Phoebe asks, but she follows the bride out to the balcony. “How long does it take to bring up some floss?”
“Carlson has to go to CVS to buy it. Apparently they don’t have any.”
“So he’s going to CVS to get it?”
“It’s literally his job.”
“Is it?”
Lila shrugs and crosses her legs. “I’m Lila, by the way.”
It sounds funny to hear Lila introduce herself so formally after all this, and Phoebe must be smirking because Lila says, “Is there something amusing about my name?”
“No,” Phoebe says. “It’s a beautiful name.”
It was a name Phoebe had wanted for herself when she was younger. Phoebe had read too many Sweet Valley High books, in which the most beautiful girl at the school was named Lila. One of the first beauty icons with brown hair that Phoebe had encountered—until Lyla from Friday Night Lights, who had long brown hair so thick, it made Phoebe want to move south and join a football team.
“It’s a nickname. My name is actually Delilah,” Lila says. “My mother named me after her favorite artist. And not even like a classically famous artist. Just some woman who lives in Bushwick and makes millions painting abstractions of babies eating womb-shaped fruit.”
Phoebe pours herself a little bit more of the wine, then offers the bottle to the bride. Why not? They have thirty minutes. And it’s her wine.
“This is better than I thought it would be,” the bride says, taking a sip. She leans over the edge to see the reception in full swing below. “Wow, you can really see the whole thing from up here.”
The bride looks through the binoculars and starts announcing names like she’s spotting wild animals at the zoo.
“There’s Nat and Suz,” Lila says. “Marla. My mother. Jim. Uncle Jim.”
Phoebe can feel the bride still wanting her to ask questions, and she does find herself wondering.
“How many people in your family are named Jim?” Phoebe asks.
“The Jims are in Gary’s family,” she says. “Gary’s father, uncle, and Gary’s dead wife’s brother.”
“Oh. Gary was married before?”
“Yeah. They had a daughter. Then his wife died of cancer. Weird, right?”
“I don’t know. Was she supposed to be immortal?”
“I mean, it’s weird that his dead wife’s brother is here as his best man. Gary insisted on Jim. He kept being like, Lila, come on, the man is my brother.”
She says it’s true that they’re really close.
“They watched a woman die together, and now they’re like, bonded for life, I guess,” she says. “Jim comes over like every Saturday, even though that’s Gary’s one day off, and we spend it watching Jim cut up monkfish at the kitchen table while he brags about himself. He’s like, Oh, I’ve just been at home building my seaplane, even though I know for a fact he doesn’t have any of the parts. And did you know his great-uncle used to be in the Mob?”
“How deep was his uncle in the Mob?”
“That’s really not the point,” Lila says.
