“I can’t do this,” he says.
Rena thinks of Dori, surely sound asleep by now, Dori with two years of wedding Pinterest boards, Dori almost certainly having rescued herself from the sweaty ministrations of the would-be stripper and then making her friends feel better about having upset her.
“You can’t just leave,” Rena says. “You have to tell her yourself.”
“I’m going to call her,” he says. “I’m going out of town for a little bit.”
Rena moves herself between JT and the elevator to look him in the eyes. He does not seem or smell drunk, only sad. That he should be sad, that he should treat this decision as a thing that is happening to him, enrages her to the point that it surprises her. She speaks to him in a fierce whisper.
“When I met you we were trapped across the world, and you told me you were calm because you’d learned not to take for granted that anything was safe. You don’t get to be scared of a woman you’ve been with since you were teenagers.”
“I was scared,” he says. “You were calm. You were so fucking calm it calmed me down, and that was what I liked about you.”
“It’s not my fault you’re a coward,” Rena says.
“You know,” says JT, “I used to think you were so brave, and sometimes I still do, and sometimes I think it’s just that there’s nothing in your life but you, and you have no idea what it means to be scared that what you do might matter.”
Rena flinches. She imagines slapping him, first imagines slapping the version of him inches from her face and then closes her eyes and imagines slapping the him from the photograph, slapping the useless mask right off of him. He wants this fight. People would come out of their rooms to see her shouting in the hallway, see a parting quarrel between old friends or old lovers or JT and a woman nursing an old wound. Excuses would be formulated; they would all calmly and quietly go back to sleep. JT is giving her a reason to give him a reason to stay. Rena does not stop him. She walks past him to the staircase and hears the elevator ding before the door closes behind her. The window in her room faces the parking lot, and she sees JT cross through the lot under the flush of the lights and disappear into his car. She sees the car flicker to life before he drives off, and she watches for quite some time, but he does not come back.
* * *
—
Rena falls asleep with the curtains still open, and in the morning the sun through the windows is dusty and insistent as the banging at the door wakes her. Her body, groggy from sex and drinking, is temporarily uncooperative, but the noise continues until she is able to rally herself to open it for Dori and Kelly, the yellow bridesmaid.
“JT is gone,” says Kelly. “He’s not answering his phone.”
Rena lets the other women in and pretends not to notice them scanning the room for any indication of her duplicity. She reminds herself that she is unhappy with JT and that this is not her fight.
“I ran into him in the hallway last night,” Rena says. “I didn’t think he would really go through with leaving.”
“Did he say where he was going?” Dori asks.
“That seems like the wrong question.”
“To you, maybe.”
“Ohio,” says Rena. The word has rounded its way out of her mouth before she has time to consider why she is saying it. But now that she has said it she keeps going. She invents an empty cabin belonging to one of JT’s friends overseas, a conversation about JT’s need to get his head together.
“OK,” says Dori. “OK.”
She sends Kelly downstairs to stall the guests and gives Rena fifteen minutes to get dressed.
* * *
—
The address Rena has given is a three-hour drive from where they are in Indiana, mostly highway. Dori buckles herself into the driver’s seat, still, Rena notices belatedly, in her pre-wedding clothes—white leggings, a pale pink zip-up hoodie, and a white T-shirt bedazzled with the word bride.
“I really am sorry,” Rena says.
“You didn’t tell him to leave, right?”
This is true, so Rena lets it sit. She is quiet until Billie Holiday’s voice from the car radio becomes unbearable.
“What do you want?” Rena asks.
“From you?”
“From life.”
“Right now I want to go find my fiancé before we lose the whole wedding day.”
“Right.”
At a traffic light, Rena’s phone dings and Dori reaches for it with a speed that could be habit but Rena recognizes as distrust. The text, of course, is not from JT.
“Michael?” Dori says. “Michael, really?”
Rena grabs the phone back. Hey, says the text. You didn’t have to take off last night.
Dori’s relief at knowing where Rena spent the night is palpable. She turns to Rena with the closest approximation of a smile it seems possible for her to manage at the moment and asks, “So what was it like?” Rena understands her prying as a kind of apology. They are going to be friends now; they are going to seal it with intimate detail the way schoolgirls would seal a blood sisterhood with a needle and a solemn touch.
“It was fine,” Rena says. “Kind of grabby and over pretty quick. We were both a little drunk.”
“I had to teach JT. It took a few years.”
“Years?”
“God, I did a lot of faking it.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t have taken as long if you hadn’t faked it?”
“That, darling, is why you’re single. If I hadn’t faked it, he would have moved on to a girl who did.”
“So she could have waited a decade for him to not marry her on their wedding day?”
They are at the turnoff for the highway, and Dori takes the right with such violent determination that Rena grips the door handle.
“My wedding day’s not over yet. We could have JT back in time to marry me and get you and Michael to the open bar.”
“There’s an open bar?”
“We’re religious. We’re not cheap. Besides, my mother always says a wedding is not a success if it doesn’t inspire another wedding. There’s a bouquet with your name on it. Cut Michael off of the gin early and teach him what to do with his hands.”
Dori is technically correct about the timeline; it is early, the sun still positioning itself to pin them in its full glow. In the flush of early morning light, Dori looks beatific, a magazine bride come to life. Rena has no idea in which direction JT actually took off, but it is possible that he has turned around, that he will turn around, that their paths will cross, the light hitting Dori in a way that reveals to him exactly how wrong he has been, and Dori will crown Rena this wedding’s unlikely guardian angel. Until Toledo, there will still technically be time to get back to the hotel and pull this wedding off, but Rena saw JT’s face last night, and if she knows anything by now, she knows the look of a man who is done with someone.