The Wishbones (10 page)

“Come on,” he said. “Follow me.”

They walked toward the rear of the Manor, past the Sherwood Forest Room—Sparkle was apparently between sets, too—past the pay phone and rest rooms, all the way to the kitchen, which sounded like it was in full swing, bells ringing, dishes clattering, people shouting. An angry-looking waitress burst through the doors, a bottle of champagne in each hand, offering them a momentary glimpse of a sweaty Mexican man in stained white clothes holding a flyswatter above his head and staring intently at a table full of steaming plates.

The hallway took a sharp turn to the right, dead-ending about fifteen feet away in an unmarked gray door with an EXIT sign glowing above it. The door opened easily and they stepped onto the patio. At the same moment he saw the lawn chairs—they were right where he remembered them—the combined smells of fresh air, Dumpster funk, and pot smoke hit him in the face. Someone said, “Shit!”

He turned toward the voice and saw Zelack and Father Mike standing close together by the smaller Dumpster, trying to look
casual. Zelack had one hand hidden behind his back, his jacket gleaming eerily in the moonlight. Father Mike looked mortified. “Don't worry,” Dave told them, the half-forgotten code of high school rushing unbidden to his lips. “It's cool.”

Father Mîke apologized for his choking fit.

“I haven't done this for years,” he explained, stamping his foot and coughing out little puffs of smoke along with his words. “I think it's stronger than it used to be.”

“No kidding.” Zelack produced this doofy little laugh. “I'm pretty fucking bamboozled as it is.”

Gretchen held the joint in front of her like a candle, eyeing it with a certain amount of skepticism.

“Where'd you get it?” she asked.

“My brother in Vegas. Every year he sends me a couple of joints taped inside a birthday card. It's kind of a family tradition.”

Gretchen took a hit and passed it on to Dave. Father Mike looked at Zelack.

“Your brother Charlie?”

“Steve. Charlie's in Atlantic City.”

“What's he do there?”

“Blackjack. Both my brothers are blackjack dealers.” Zelack shook his head. “What are the odds against that?”

Father Mike skipped his turn, passing the joint straight to Gretchen.

“Are they identical?” he asked.

“Fraternal,” said Zelack. “But it's hard to tell them apart.”

Dave tilted his head back and blew smoke at the sky. The moon was round and cheesy, just about full.

Hot! Hot! Hot!
he thought.

“Twin blackjack dealers?” said Gretchen.

“Yup.” Zelack grinned. “Every mother's dream.”

“Charlie's a good guy,” Father Mike declared. “I'll never forget the day he broke his leg.”

Zelack took the joint from Dave but forgot to smoke it. He looked around the circle and smiled approvingly.

“Cool. Everyone's in uniform.”

All four of them traded looks, confirming this observation. The joint made two more circuits before Zelack consulted his watch.

“Shit,” he said. “Break's almost over.”

“How'd your brother break his leg?” Dave asked.

“He jumped off the Little League field house with an umbrella in his hand. Must have been fifty kids watched him do it.”

Father Mike took a box of Tic Tacs out of his pocket and offered some to Gretchen.

“Everyone's always in uniform,” she told him, as he shook the little white pebbles into her hand.

“Thought he could fly,” Zelack added sadly.

“His leg snapped like a pencil,” Father Mike reported. “It was a horrible sound.”

“Icarus,” said Gretchen.

“Tic Tac?” asked Father Mike.

Cretchen lit up a Parliament and exhaled through her nose, which, in profile at least, seemed a little too long and narrow, vaguely reminiscent of Jughead's. It was her one odd feature, the arresting detail that made him want to keep staring, to commit her face to memory for future contemplation.

This is what Julie's afraid of
he thought. They were alone now, sitting on the dishwashers’ lawn chairs, listening to the clamor of the kitchen and the shushing of traffic on Route 22. Break was just about over, but the night felt too soft and peaceful to make going
inside seem like a plausible course of action.
This is what she meant by “out having fun.”

“I'm pretty buzzed,” Gretchen observed.

“I'm right there with you,” he assured her.

Julie seemed far away. He tried to imagine her sitting around the table with her parents and her aunt and uncle, all of them worshiping at the altar of the miraculous cheesecake, but he couldn't quite bring the picture into focus. He felt somehow liberated by this failure, as though it canceled out the fact of their engagement, at least for the moment.

“I never expected to get high with a priest,” she said.

“Father Mike's a good guy.”

Cigarette clamped between her teeth, she laid one foot on top of her knee, pulled off her green shoe, and dropped it unceremoniously on the ground.

“What's with the other one?” she asked, reaching down with both hands to massage her stockinged foot. “Did he borrow that jacket from Liberace or what?”

“Who, Zelack?” Dave tried to think of something cutting to say, but his fund of hostility seemed to be mysteriously depleted. “He's okay, too.”

Gretchen recrossed her legs and pulled off the other shoe, letting it fall beside its companion.

“How'd you end up in a wedding band?” she asked, just making conversation as she went to work on her instep.

Dave thought it over. It was one of those questions that had a dozen different answers.

“They asked me,” he said.

“You guys are pretty good. Usually I can't stand wedding bands.”

The mix of praise and condescension in her comment called him back to reality. He looked at his watch and grimaced.

“Damn,” he said, leaping up from his chair. “We better get back.”

She looked up at him with mild interest.

“I think I'll hang out here for a while.”

“You sure?”

Gretchen smiled. Inside the kitchen there was a loud crash, like someone had just dropped a whole tray of dishes.
I could have it bad for her
, Dave decided.

“Save me a dance,” she told him.

He was late.

The band had already taken the stage when he careened through the door, Artie glaring at him, Buzzy looking mock-scandalized, Ian pretending not to notice, Stan cleaning out his ear with the tip of a drumstick. In an effort to excuse himself, Dave winced and rubbed his stomach, feigning indigestion.

Everything seemed unreal as he snatched his guitar out of its stand and threaded his head through the strap—the room, himself, the bride and groom standing by the fake cake with the bride and groom on top, both of them clutching the handle of what appeared to be a cement trowel and squinting through the glare from Lenny's spotlight.

“Okay,” said Ian, glancing quickly at Dave to make sure he was set. “The big moment has arrived. It's time to cut the cake.”

In Dave's opinion, one of the major improvements in wedding music in recent years involved the phase-out of the traditional cake-cutting song (“The bride cuts the cake/The bride cuts the cake/Hi-ho the cherrio/The bride cuts the cake”) in favor of less idiotic tunes. Unless instructed otherwise, or unless one or both members of the happy couple happened to be approaching retirement age, the Wishbones chose “When I'm Sixty Four” for this interlude in the ceremony.

Staci and PJ. brought the trowel down on the fake cake and smiled like politicians cutting a ribbon. Even as they did so, waitresses had already begun fanning out across the room, distributing slices of the real thing.

So
, thought Dave,
you really can have it and eat it, too.

The maitre d’ presented the bride and groom with their own plates for the completion of the ritual. To Dave's surprise, they played it cool, feeding each other small bites from a fork and smooching discreetly afterward, resisting the temptation to mash the cake in each other's faces or engage in some serious tonsil-licking with their mouths full of mush and frosting.

Its work done, a waitress wheeled the model cake out of the room, back to wherever it was things like that got stored when they weren't in use, some dank basement full of cardboard desserts and artificial flowers. The maitre d’ nodded at Artie, who relayed the message to Ian.

“At this time,” Ian announced, “I'd like to invite all the single ladies out onto the dance floor. And I do mean
all
the single ladies.”

No more than a dozen bachelorettes heeded the call, sheepishly clumping together at the far end of the floor, as if for protection. All the bridesmaids were present except Gretchen. Dave wondered if she was still hiding out on the Dumpster patio, massaging her feet and enjoying the almost-fresh air between drags on her Parliament. She didn't strike him as the type who'd get too upset about missing an opportunity to make a diving leap for a bundle of flowers.

The event went off peacefully, according to what appeared to be a prearranged plan. The moment Staci heaved the bouquet, all the women but one beat a hasty retreat, leaving Heidi Lambrusco wide open for an easy catch. It looked so much like a touchdown pass, Dave half expected Heidi to spike the flowers and bump chests with all three of her sisters.

The “Magic Chair” sequence followed the bouquet toss. Despite its lascivious overtones, the whole rigamarole seemed so tedious and time-consuming—bride sits in “Magic Chair,” groom removes bride's garter, groom tosses garter to assembled single men, man who catches garter places it on leg of woman who caught bouquet, who is herself now seated in “Magic Chair”— that Dave wondered how it managed to survive for however long a practice like this had to survive to become a tradition. He tried his best to float above it, playing the inevitable can-can music on auto pilot, tuning out Ian's tired spiel about the bride and groom receiving ten years of happiness for every inch the garter traveled on its journey up the thigh of the woman who caught the bouquet.

When all of that was put to rest, the band, with the exception of Ian, vacated the stage for the breaking of the Ceremonial Wishbone. Dave fled immediately to the downstairs rest room, less out of necessity than a desire to avoid a lecture from Artie on the importance of punctuality. He thought about heading out to the patio to check on Gretchen, but wasn't sure he'd be able to make it there and back before it was time to climb back onstage and play some real music for a change.

The Ceremonial Wishbone was a corny gimmick Artie had cooked up about a year before, much to Ian's dismay. Central to the ritual was the bone itself, which Ian and the bride broke onstage. It looked like something from
The Flintstones
, a three-foot-tall segmented piece of V-shaped plastic, held together by a nearly inconspicous velcro fastener. The joke was that Ian always got the longer piece and therefore got to make the wish. He made a big show of it, scratching his chin and gazing off into the distance, then asked the bride if she wanted to know what he'd wished for. She always did.

“On behalf of the band,” he'd tell her, “I'd like to wish you
and your husband a lifetime of health, happiness, and joy. May your marriage always be graced by the music of love.”

Ian didn't have a problem with any of that. What he objected to was the second half of the ritual, which called for him to serenade the bride with an a capella rendition of “You Are So Beautiful.” Some of them cried, but most just stood there, still clutching the losing end of the wishbone, looking troubled and perplexed by this unexpected turn of events.

Dave splashed some water on his face and checked in with the mirror. He was still more stoned than he wanted to be, but the buzz was quieter now, a little less distracting. He rarely smoked dope anymore, and every time he did reminded him of why he'd stopped in the first place—he'd reached the point where coming down was the best part of the experience.

Artie was waiting at the top of the stairs, arms crossed, a stern expression on his face. Dave cursed under his breath. He was in no mood to bow and scrape to the great leader, begging forgiveness for the two minutes of inconvenience he'd inflicted on the universe. Artie snagged him by the coat sleeve as he tried to hurry past.

“Hold on,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

Dave let go of a deep breath, the long day catching up with him all at once. He felt limp, wrung out.

“I had a stomachache,” he explained wearily. “I lost track of the time.”

Instead of arguing, Artie gave a distracted nod. His mind was elsewhere, his voice more worried than angry.

“What's happening to us?”

“Huh?”

“The band. I think we're falling apart.”

“Come on,” said Dave. “Don't be ridiculous.”

Artie shrugged. “Just look at us. Stan's a wreck, Buzzy's a drunk, Ian's out in left field somewhere, and now you're starting to act up on me, too. Where's it gonna stop?”

Dave shifted his gaze to the floor, then forced himself to look back up.

“You really think Buzzy's a drunk?”

“I think he's got a problem, yeah.”

Dave peered down the corridor. Stan and Buzzy waved hello.

“The band seems pretty solid to me.”

Artie wiped away the mustache of perspiration that had formed above his upper lip. He was good-looking in a bug-eyed, slightly unsavory sort of way, and believed in smelling nice for the ladies.

“I hope so. It took me four years to put together this lineup. All of us worked too fucking hard to get where we are. I'd hate to see us screw it up now.”

Dave couldn't decide if Artie was asking for reassurance or trying to make him feel guilty or trying to do both at once. Whichever it was, his concern for the band seemed genuine.

“We'll be all right,” Dave told him.

Artie made a halfhearted stab at smiling and put his hand on Dave's shoulder.

“Help me out, okay?”

Before Dave could reply, Gretchen snuck up from behind and grabbed hold of his elbow, squeezing it in a way that made him forget all about Artie.

“I'm back,” she said brightly. “Did I miss anything important?”