“Yeah,” Phoebe admits. “I know what you mean.”
They are quiet, and Jim gets confused.
“None of this really matters, though. I don’t know why I get so excited about it in my head sometimes. They’re getting married. Fuck. They’re getting married. And I’m the best man. And do you know why we’re giving our speeches at the rehearsal dinner and not the wedding? Because Lila said she doesn’t trust me to do it at the actual wedding. I mean, that shit hurt. I thought if anything, Lila trusted me. And that just makes me feel like all of it was in my head. She doesn’t want me. Probably never did.”
When Phoebe says nothing, Jim looks at her.
“Right?” Jim asks.
They’re playing chicken again. But all Phoebe will say is, “It’s not as black and white as you’d think.”
“So that means she wants me a little,” Jim says, and smiles. “At least I can go down in my seaplane knowing that.”
In their silence, Phoebe hears the sounds of people returning to their room. The Blending of the Families is over.
“Lila and Gary are back,” Jim says.
Phoebe puts a finger to his mouth.
“Shh,” she says. “This is research.”
They pull out their notepads, pencils ready, and this makes them laugh again. But there is only the sound of Gary saying goodbye to Lila in her room. The murmurs of Lila’s voice. Then the closing of a door. A faucet running. The sounds of a woman alone getting ready for bed. Brushing her teeth. Using the toilet. The steady routines of her night. Yet Phoebe feels rocked by the noise. She can feel each sound deep inside her head. She must be really high. She turns over on her side like she does in yoga class. Under the bed, she notices something. She pulls out a credit card folded in half.
“Jim,” she says. “This folded-up credit card is from 1991.”
“So?”
“Why would it be from 1991? Isn’t that weird?”
“Is it?”
“What do you think happened to this guy?”
“I think focusing on the credit card is a bad idea right now.”
“But what is this credit card doing there, under the bed, folded up from thirty-one years ago? I mean, I can’t think of any reasonable non-weird reason for it still being here.”
Jim looks at her. “I think office hours are over.”
“But I’m not ready to go home,” she says. “I like it here.”
“So don’t,” Jim says. “Stay here.”
He says it so simply, it sounds possible to Phoebe. She will just stay here, on Jim’s floor, listening to the sounds of Lila’s quiet night.
“Is she crying?” Jim asks.
Phoebe listens for sobs, but she can’t hear anything except the soft waves from outside the window.
“I think that’s just the ocean,” Phoebe says.
Phoebe stares at the ceiling and wonders what Lila thinks when she curls up in bed. Does she regret planning such a big wedding? Does she feel proud of her choices? Does she feel trapped in the spectacle of her own making? And how did weddings get like this? How did they get so big, come to be so important, that a woman couldn’t see her way out of it? That a woman would sacrifice her entire life for it? These are big questions, Phoebe thinks, and good writing is always driven by a big question.
“I know what to write in my speech,” she says.
BACK IN HER room, she writes her speech while eating the last of the Oreos that are Not Legally Oreos. And no, it’s not her dissertation, but it’s five whole pages, and afterward she feels victorious. She has completed a writing assignment for the first time in years, and it makes her feel like she can do anything.
I can go buy Frank the dog, she thinks. I can find a job here.
She searches for professor vacancies at nearby colleges and boarding schools. She searches for apartments to rent on Craigslist, even though she suspects Craigslist is just exclusively for murdering people now.
She finds a cute place on Mary Street with high ceilings where she could stay for a month. A condo on Thames where she could stay the entire year. But she is most intrigued by the ad for a mansion on Ocean Drive, owned by a man named Geoffrey. He is looking for something he calls a winter keeper to live there until May and keep it looking like a mansion through the winter. She has never heard of the phrase winter keeper before, but she likes it.
She messages all of them.
SATURDAY
The Rehearsal Dinner
In the morning, Lila stops by on her way out to the flower vendor. She does not say anything about the blending of the families, just talks about a power outage and all the flowers that are melting in the fridge.
“Melting?” Phoebe asks.
But Lila doesn’t explain. “I need you to take Gary to run some errands today, because a fun fact about Gary is that he can hardly walk right now.”
“Why not?”
“He hurt his back again. This time from surfing. Thank God I didn’t go. What a disaster. Imagine if I couldn’t walk today? I don’t know what Past Lila was thinking, planning a surfing morning before her wedding.”
