This is exactly what Phoebe has always hated and loved about life—how unpredictable it is, how things can change in an instant. One moment she could be wondering what to make her husband for dinner and the next moment he could walk into the room and tell her he is in love with someone else. But it is also true that one day she can be alone in a room preparing to die, and the next, she can be preparing to be on a boat with beautiful strangers.
“I’ll see you in the lobby at two.”
THE PATRIOTIC FRENCH TOAST is not shaped like a flag. There is nothing at all patriotic about it. Phoebe is disappointed by this.
But she eats it anyway. She is very hungry, she realizes. She washes her face in the sink, then brushes her hair, and what a goddamned beautiful brush. Carved out of a solid piece of wood like a boat.
She takes a long shower, using all the products, so elegantly packaged she wants to eat them, too. She rubs what smells like a wooded forest all over her body. She hears another knock on the door but opens it to find only a bag of clothes that Lila left. She peers in. She sees something shiny.
“Jesus,” Phoebe says.
But it feels exciting, actually, to put on some other woman’s sequins for the day.
“Everybody, this is Phoebe,” Lila says.
The group says a collective hello, like they are all in a cult. High Bun is the first to hug her.
“I’m Suz,” High Bun says, though High Bun no longer sports a high bun. She now wears a long fishtail braid hanging casually over her right shoulder. Her hair is endless. There is something almost prehistoric about it. No wonder the bun was so high. “I’m Lila’s friend from Portsmouth Abbey.”
“Portsmouth Abbey?” Phoebe asks.
“Don’t worry, we’re not nuns,” says Neck Pillow, who now has a tiny diamond necklace resting at the center of her throat. “Just Catholic boarding school survivors. Hi, I’m Nat.”
No one else hugs Phoebe, but each wedding person continues to introduce themselves by stating their relation to the bride or groom. The groom’s sister, Marla. The groom’s daughter, whose name is Mel but prefers to be called Juice.
“Right,” Lila says. “I keep forgetting you want to be called Juice. And why is that again?”
Lila waits with a smile, as if she’s giving Juice the chance to tell a really funny story about herself. But the groom’s daughter just stands there, fiddling with a small green plastic circle in her hand. Her aunt is the one who speaks.
“We just always have,” Marla says with a cool tone, smoothing the dark hair that frames her face. She has gray splints on both her wrists. She takes a sip of her black coffee.
“Yeah, like since the dawn of time,” Juice says, with a learned coolness that sounds years older than eleven, which is what Phoebe guesses she is. Her outfit seems years older, too—big black combat boots, a cropped top that sits just below her navel. It looks uncanny against her childlike features—the baby fat, the missing canine tooth she must have recently lost.
Phoebe waits for Lila to say something snarky back, but Lila is flattened into silence by their tones. By their jokes, if that’s what they even are. Lila puts her arm around her future stepdaughter, and when Juice slinks away, Lila looks at Phoebe like, See? And Phoebe does see. Phoebe feels suddenly protective of Lila, who already seems different around the wedding people. Quieter, more subdued. She does not talk at length about all of her family members at once. She is polite, gracious, cheery to a fault, and Phoebe remembers feeling pressure to be the same way at her own wedding. She feels glad she can say things when Lila cannot.
“Like on the sixth day, God created the oceans, and on the seventh day, people started calling you Juice?” Phoebe asks.
“That’s very funny, yes,” Marla says, without laughing. “That’s exactly how it happened.”
“I’m pretty sure God created the oceans on the second day, though,” Lila says.
“Yeah, they were definitely, like, a priority,” Neck Pillow says, and the women laugh.
But Marla ignores them.
“And who are you again?” Marla looks at Phoebe’s outfit, as if the outfit will answer, though Phoebe has no idea what she communicates with this oversize sequined sweater, leggings made from some plastic faux-leather fabric that Phoebe avoided buying for nearly twenty years of her adult life, and sandals with a fake sunflower wedged between the toes that she bought from the gift shop.
“I’m Phoebe,” she says. It feels surreal to introduce herself to the wedding people. They can hear her now. “I was asked to be a body on the boat.”
The women laugh.
“Phoebe and I met at my mother’s gallery,” Lila says.
Phoebe is surprised by how coolly and quickly the lie comes out of Lila’s mouth. It seems unnecessary to Phoebe. But as soon as she hears it, Marla’s face lights up with interest.
“Oh, interesting, you work at the gallery?” Marla asks.
“No. I’m a professor,” Phoebe says.
“Phoebe just came in one day to look,” Lila says. “And we hit it off!”
“That’s how you met Gary!” High Bun says.
“Yes, we all know the story,” Marla says.
But that doesn’t stop Lila from telling it, because it seems that nobody, not even Lila, can get over the coincidence of it all.
“When Gary came into the gallery, I had no idea he was my father’s doctor,” Lila says. “At the time, I just thought he was this guy.”
“Wasn’t Jim there, too?” Marla says. “You always leave Jim out of the story.”
“Jim is not the point of the story,” High Bun says.
“Jim was just there for Gary,” Lila says. “Jim didn’t actually come to see the art.”
Gary was the one who cared about art, who was transfixed by the painting of her mother and just stared at it for what felt like ten minutes. Finally, Lila went over, and he had all these questions. Was this acrylic? Did Lila know the artist? Were they local? No—he was a painter who lived in New York. William Withers.
“I can’t believe Gary had no idea that the painting was of your own mother,” Neck Pillow says.
