“What’s wrong with you?” Silas whispered at one point, but I was pressing my lips together too hard to speak, and I was looking up intently into the rafters to keep tears from falling. “Want to wipe your eyes on my tie?”
The man in front of him turned around to glare. Silas nodded at him and he flipped back to face the front. I worked harder on self-control and by the time that the vows were over, I was able to smile at the newly married couple as they walked together out of the church. But I still needed a moment to breathe before we got into the car.
And my “date” looked extremely…I wasn’t sure how to read his expression, but maybe it was disapproving. “I’m ok,” I told him. “I should have told you that I always cry at weddings.”
“You turned the color of a strawberry while you held it in,” he said. “What’s there to be sad about? You think they’re not right for each other?”
“No, not at all! From everything that Rashelle has said, they’re great,” I assured him. I inhaled to the count of three and exhaled just the same. “I’m ready to go.”
The ceremony had been very long, with lots of readings by lots of different family members and friends. When we arrived at the reception hall, I was both hungry and thirsty. The wedding traffic as we’d approached had made me nervous, too, so I was also slightly cranky by the time we got inside.
“Do you want something to eat?” Silas suggested. “I need a beer, myself.”
“Yes, please,” I said gratefully, and I watched him move through the crowd toward the appetizer tables and bar. People generally parted for him and I could see his blonde head—
“Who is that man you brought, Camille?”
Due to the crush of other guests, I had missed Octavia’s approach. I should have spotted her, though, because she wore a hat with two towering ostrich tail feathers. They added more than a foot to her height, and she wasn’t short to begin with.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” she asked. I had tried to do Silas’s glare, but it hadn’t produced the desired effect ofsilence or retreat because she kept demanding answers. “Who is that man you’re with? Is he a criminal? Is that a gang tattoo that I see on his neck?”
“What?No!”
Silas himself returned at that point. “Hey,” he greeted us. He offered a plate of food to me and I took it happily. “I think I already figured out which one is Uncle Horndog. Stay away from the guy in a yellow tux,” he advised.
“Uncle…who is your escort tonight, Camille?” Octavia asked. “Is he capable of obedient behavior in social situations?”
He turned to look at her. “Do you think I’m a fu—” But before he could complete that question and this turned into a confrontation at Rashelle’s reception, I held a pig in a blanket to his lips.
“You can share,” I said, and he ate it from my hand. His blonde moustache tickled my fingertips. As he was still chewing, I said, “Oh! There’s Aunt Nancy. Excuse us, Octavia.”
“Did she think I was a damn dog?” he asked after he’d swallowed and as I led him away by the sleeve of his blue blazer.
“She acts like the same way to everyone.”
“I saw you shiver just now,” he said. “It’s a few degrees below the normal high for the second weekend in September, but the body heat in here—”
“I’m fine,” I said, and I wished he hadn’t noticed my reaction as I’d fed him the hors d'oeuvre. “Also, I don’t have an aunt here.”
“I figured that. I also figured out who that woman was when I saw how she was shaking her finger at you. You mention her sometimes around the dinner table and you say mean things like, ‘She’s not a generous person’ and ‘Sometimes I wish we had hired someone else, but that’s not very charitable of me.’ Let’s go get more of those baby hot dogs.”
We did, and we ran into a few other people from my office who stared at Silas but, unlike Octavia, didn’t call him a criminal. They only seemed curious when I introduced him as my housemate (the truth, and I left it at that and attempted the glare again). Maybe I was perfecting it because the only questions they asked were things about where he worked and if he’d ever played football.
“Nah,” he answered the last one. “I look like I did, though. Maybe in another life I would have, but the only guys in uniform that I tussled with were cops.” Munir laughed and Silas seemed surprised. He had been serious.
I remembered that Iker’s dad owned a machine shop in the area that people here called “Downriver,” meaning south of the city of Detroit, and I asked him about that. They got involved in a long conversation but it ended up having little to do with jobs, which had been my intention. Instead, Silas got to hear all about how Iker and his wife were going to have a baby in a few months.
“Of course, he’s talking about his family again,” Munir said to us all. “Does he think about anything else? Iker, I remember the fun days when you used to go on for hours about interest rates. You have babies on the brain.” Iker laughed and I tried to as well, but after a moment, I excused myself and went to the bar.I ordered and then stood studying my glass and telling myself to cut out the pity party.
“What’s that? Vodka?” Silas asked from behind me.
“Yes, but with soda, too.”
He took the glass from my hand and sipped from it. “That’s one-eighth liquor and the rest of the eighths are tonic, not soda. It’s the weakest drink I’ve ever tasted. It’s a cash bar, right? Want me to get your money back?”
“No, thank you. I don’t need anything stronger.” Someone had just started to ring a bell and thank goodness, the cocktail hour was over and I could sit for a moment in these heels. We all went into an even larger room with tables and a gigantic buffet.
“This is my kind of spread,” he mentioned. “I do great at all-you-can-eat.”
