The Wedding Party

I’d moved into Ernie Prewitt’s basement room for thirty-five dollars a week. He was a mechanic at the marina where I worked, and he’d set me up with a cot nestled between his worktable and an array of props and grease-blackened engine parts. My fiancée was living in our apartment with her sister, though they meant to move inland, she told me. Here, there was a transom-cracked skiff laid down and propped underside up against the far wall with a few dried-up barnacles still in a crowd on the hull. There was a single light: a hanging bulb and a chain, which rattled from Ernie’s footsteps through the ceiling. The floor was unvarnished cement and cold and damp during the heavier rains. Sometimes, Ernie’s wife had leftover dinners, which she would leave for me in foil at the back door. In the evenings, I went to drink at this no-place, seaside bar called Renny’s Yard, where the wood-paneled walls were decorated with old harpoons and paddles and green glass fishing floats in sacks of netting. A paling of liquor bottles lined the mirror-backed bar and seemed to double by its reflection. This night, as the sun went to a drab little ruby and slipped, still glowing, into the ocean, a wedding party showed up. I noticed them come in, all sunburnt and raw-eyed from the ocean water. They bought their drinks and set up in the corner by the shuffleboard and the twin pool tables and broke into a few groups, except for one young woman who trailed off aimlessly toward the bar. She wore a little coral swimsuit cover-up and her bikini straps up, back, and tied behind her neck and her black hair pinned messily. The way she looked was something I felt in my guts. Her face was as small and round and as delicate, it seemed, as a bowl, which you might turn up in your hands and drink from. And before the shame of all my life could well up in me, as it usually did on such occasions, she came over and said, “You wanna buy a maid of honor something to drink?” So we sat there for a while and got drunk on vodka sodas. She told me her little sister was getting married tomorrow. She asked if I could believe that, and I said that I could. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” the maid of honor said. A couple of the guys she’d come with noticed her talking with me, and they seemed to discuss this a bit before losing interest and returning to their games. “Over there,” she said. “See that