Page 44 of Best Woman

“Stop it, Kim,” I say. She reaches toward me, but I flinch away, bracing myself.

“I’m just trying to—”

“I lied,” I gasp, feeling winded. “It wasn’t true. Aiden has never been anything but good to me. He always wanted me in the wedding.”

“What are you talking about? You said—”

“No, you said.” I hate how defensive I sound. “You assumed. And I let you, fuck, I’m so sorry.” I am a worm, a cockroach, a slug. I am the lowest creature to walk the earth. “I let you believe it so you’d…I don’t know, so you’d like me.”

She recoils, and I die a little bit more inside. But even worse is Aiden, how devastated he looks.

“I’m sorry,” I tell them both. Kim has her arms wrapped around herself and I can see her shutting down, going cold. A door opens and someone shouts Aiden’s name and he gives me a look that says, very clearly, I’m not done with you, and stalks off.

“Kim,” I say, ready to get down on my knees and beg for forgiveness. I will grovel until Aiden and Rachel’s first anniversary if I need to.

“Do you realize how fucked-up what you did is?” Her voice is flat, and her eyes are empty. “You manipulated me. That’s not normal, Julia.”

“I know.” Finally, I’m crying. I can’t help it. Not ugly sobs like I wish, sobs that would hurt but would be healing. Just silent tears running down my cheeks. “I liked you so much and I was sure that the only way you’d be into me was if you…felt sorry for me, I guess. That sounds so horrible.”

“It is horrible. You could have been honest, but instead, you used your fake sob story to get into my pants. That’s low, Julia.”

I nod.

She shakes something off, squares herself, and looks beyond me to where the reception dinner is still going on. Right, there are 150 people I know intimately just inside.

“I need…to not be here right now.” She glances around her, eyes locking on the sun setting in the distance over the golf course.

Kim kicks off her heels, snatches them up, and starts walking through the perfectly manicured grass.

She stops and looks back at me over her perfect shoulder, all the warmth I kindled gone from her eyes. “Don’t follow me. Go fuck yourself.”

She leaves and I’m alone again, but not for long.

“Julia? You OK, kiddo?” It’s my dad, the absolute last person I expected to follow me out.

“I’m fine, Dad. Just needed a minute.” He nods, takes a vape out, and puffs away.

He holds it out and I take it, glad for something to do—at least until I start choking on the pina colada– scented vapor.

Dad thumps me on the back, then leaves his hand between my shoulder blades, rubbing soft circles that are surprisingly soothing.

“You know,” he says, “I’m not supposed to drink with the back pain medication I’m on, and I’ve had two glasses of wine.”

“OK,” I say.

“And my doctor doesn’t like me driving at night.

Says my eyes are going. Sure could use someone to give me a lift home,” he says, poker face firmly in place.

My dad does not have back problems, and his eye prescription is so fierce I’m pretty sure he sees better than I do.

He’s still rubbing those circles on my back, and it’s so much easier to just take the out he’s offering.

“I guess I could give you a lift home, though I don’t know how I’d get back to Mom’s.”

He pulls me close. “That’s OK, kiddo, the guest room is yours if you want it.”

It’s not really a solution to anything. Mom will have moved past any embarrassment by now and me crashing with Dad will just reignite their bitter resentment for each other, making it even easier for her to make the disaster of this whole evening my fault.

And I don’t want my dad to think he’s scored some points with me—or more likely, against my mother.

If I hadn’t messed up so massively with Kim I might have spent the night in her hotel room, but since I’ve screwed that up… why not.

“Got an extra toothbrush?”

He smiles. “Sure do. An electric one, even.”

I sigh. “Got any moisturizer?”

“No,” he says, “but I think Aiden left some hyaluronic acid serum the last time he spent the night.”

Of course he did.

“We’ll leave as soon as they cut the cake,” he says, rubbing my back the way he used to when I was little and had a cold.

“OK.”

“Now let’s get back inside,” he says, taking my hand in his. He doesn’t let go.

Rachel and Aiden’s first dance is to a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” which is remarkably tasteful for them—Mom had played Blue on the record player most Sundays when we were growing up.

This is followed by Fleetwood Mac’s “You Make Loving Fun,” which I don’t think the wedding band singer really has the voice for.

Brody and Brian suffer through dances with me before disappearing, probably off to sneak into the bar storage room or, more likely, kill lizards on the golf course.

I can see rows of empty golf carts lined up through the window, backlit by the floodlights, an endless, manicured green meadow beyond.

Somewhere out there Kim is hating me, deconstructing every moment we’ve spent together this week and seeing it through the new eyes of that hatred.

I dance with my dad, and we both do an admirable job pretending it isn’t weird. When the song (“My Girl” by the Temptations, who would not be pleased with the cover) ends, Dad catches the eye of someone behind me and passes me along.

It’s Aiden, slightly sweaty and very tipsy. “Saved a dance for your little brother?” he asks.

“Just don’t step on my shoes,” I say, taking his hand. “I borrowed them from a pop star.”

“We asked the band to sprinkle in a few Hannah G covers,” he says, laying a hand on my waist. “Rachel and I learned the choreography for ‘Love Aneurysm.’?”

“Congratulations,” I say as we move slowly to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”

“Thanks,” he says. “Can you believe it?”

“Yeah.” I hadn’t been able to, earlier, but here he is. My brother, the husband, all grown up. “I’m really happy for you.”

“Thanks,” he says, flushing. He pulls me closer. “I’m so sorry about Mom, Jules. But I’m also really fucking mad at you. What the fuck?”

“I know,” I say, dropping my head against his shoulder. “I’m sorry and I’m angry and I’m fucking destroyed and god, I did exactly what I didn’t want to do: I made your whole wedding about me.”

“You had some help,” he says. “And believe me, I’m pissed at Mom too, but I can’t deal with any of this right now.

It’s my wedding, so I’m gonna dance with my sister and believe that she has a really good explanation for what just happened and hope she knows we’re gonna figure this shit out when it’s no longer actively my wedding . ”

“I can do that,” I say, nodding against his shoulder.

“But before that, I need you to find the maid of honor so my wife can stop freaking out.”

“Fuck.”

I find Rachel by the cake, a staggering tower of frosted roses.

She gives me a tight, desperate hug and pulls back to look soulfully into my eyes, something sisterly passing between us.

I nod in a way that I hope implies We’ll talk about it later.

I think she gets it, because she switches into business mode. “Have you seen Kim?”

“Not for a while. She…we had…an argument.”

“About what your mom said,” she asks.

“Kind of. I…I fucked up, Rach. Pretty bad. I need to talk to her. I know I can’t make anything better, but I owe her…something. An explanation, or a better apology, or the chance to tell me to fuck off and die.”

Rachel looks confused for a moment, but looks around the room at the hundreds of people she’s entertaining and snaps her fingers.

Immediately one of the Rachels is beside her, holding a glass of water and her phone.

Rachel sips one while perusing the other.

She pinches two fingers, clearly zooming in on something on the screen.

“She’s out on the golf course,” Rachel says, glancing out the window, and then back to her phone. “She must have been walking for a while, she’s all the way out by the seventeenth hole.”

I hold in an unnecessary joke about holes. “Is that a lot, relatively? I don’t know anything about golf.”

“It’s a lot,” says the other Rachel, lips pursed. Rachel Prime glances back out the window, eyes narrowing before her face lights up with inspiration.

“I think you could catch up.”

Ten minutes and a hefty tip to a groundskeeper later, I’m zooming across the grass in a golf cart, seizing up in fear every time I go over a small mound of earth and drop, experiencing the sick weightless feeling you get when an airplane briefly dips and your stomach lifts into your chest. But that feeling remains even as the grass levels out, and in fact, grows the closer I get to the little pin on my phone that Rachel had shared with me.

In the blue twilight, the golf course looks lush and endless, stretching out in every possible direction.

It’s kind of beautiful, but then I remember that men spend their time here hitting little balls with sticks and wish fervently for it to get bulldozed and turned into a strip mall.

The green grass slopes upward into a hill, and as I crest it the harsh, fluorescent lamplight hits my eyes, blinding me for a second.

When I regain my vision, Kim is there, standing beside a small hole in the ground.

She is smoking a cigarette and tipping the ashes into said hole and looks completely unsurprised to see me.

I bring the golf cart to an abrupt and juddering stop and lurch down onto the grass, unsteady in my heels. Kim keeps smoking silently as I cross the distance toward her, wondering what I am going to say and increasingly having no fucking clue the closer I get.

“Hi,” I say.

“I told you not to follow,” she says, but she mostly sounds defeated.

I gesture to her cigarette. “Can I have one of those?”

“This was my last one.”

“Oh,” I say. “OK.”

“What do you want?” she asks, turning to face the rising moon.

I shrug, though she can’t see me. “I don’t know. Probably nothing I deserve.”