Doug was now looking at the table in the same disassociated way that Carver had been earlier. Scott looked at Letty again,and she gave him another significant look and mouthed,We need to debrief.Scott nodded.
“So is your dad alive, or?” Lillian said to Sana.
Sana, who was eating her salmon, started coughing. “Yes,” she choked out.
“We had a contentious divorce,” Maryam said, her mouth a flat line. “He lives in London now. The girls plan to visit him when they go on their honeymoon.”
“You know what…” Doug said, getting to his feet and starting to collect up half-full bottles of wine.
They all waited for the rest of the sentence, but it didn’t come. “Yeah, Dad?” Conway said, sounding amused.
“Yeah,” Doug said under his breath, heading for the house with four bottles in his hands.
When the door shut behind him, Conway quietly said, “Poor Dad… runs away from his hometown full of poor assholes who only drink for fun and ends up somewhere full of rich assholes who only drink for fun.”
“Connie,” Nora said in gentle reprimand.
“To Dad and his terrible luck,” Chip said, raising his wine glass. Nora shot him an unpleasant look.
“Or,” Scott said, “to the brides?”
Everyone made noises of approval and lifted their glasses. As they were toasting, Lillian whispered in Scott’s ear, “I just figured you out.”
“Yeah?” Scott said, feeling a tingle of unpleasant curiosity.
“You like to be the most innocent person in the room.” She squeezed his arm. “I get it, but you know, it’s probably cost you a fair amount of money in your life.”
Scott snapped his head around, his pulse quickening. Lillian looked at him with no trace of hostility in her face.
“Okay, fuck you then,” he whispered back.
She smirked at him and made kitty claws with her fingers. Scott looked away from her, unsettled, and absent-mindedly cracked a few of the knuckles on his right hand.
The rehearsal dinner portion of the evening dragged on into dessert, then after-dinner scotch in the den — where the bookshelves built into the wood-paneled walls were full of sports trophies alongside legal texts that weren’t important enough to be displayed upstairs in the office, and the walls themselves held less art than Scott would have preferred. He had vague but fond memories of hanging out with Carver in here, pretending to watch a movie while fooling around under a blanket and springing apart when they heard the front door open down the hall. The golden retriever wandered around sniffing everyone, looking for neck scritches.
Around nine, Letty and Sana started making noises about needing to be up early the following day, and the party began breaking up. The bridesmaids went to help Nora and Doug clean, Chip and his wife took their sleeping children upstairs, and Scott made eye contact with Letty before slipping back out to the patio. He was rolling a joint under the table when Letty and Sana came out.
“Ooh, is that what I think it is?” Sana said, lifting onto her tiptoes to try to peer over the table into his lap. She and Letty were both only about 5’3.
“It is, but I keep fucking it up,” Scott said, squinting at the paper he was twiddling.
Letty went to the light switch and turned the sconces up a little. “Scotty, they make cones for this now.”
“I like to do it old-school.”
“But consider the fact that we’re getting old and losing our eyesight.”
“I won’t consider that,” Scott muttered. “My eyesight is perfect. Hold on, almost got it.”
Sana sat down beside him, and Letty sat down beside her. They made eye contact and started to giggle like they had a secret; Scott glanced up at them as he finished rolling the joint and seared it.
“Nothing,” Letty said. “We’re just excited.”
“About tomorrow? Hell yeah.”
“It’s funny how it doesn’t feel like we’re already married,” Sana said. “Maybe since we’ve been planning this for so long.”
“Yeah, it’s weird, we eloped ‘cause we wanted to do a part of it that was just us,” Letty said. “But then keeping that a secret from most people is just making it feel like it’s not even true.”
