For the Love of Friends

by Confino, Sara Goodman

  What’s wrong?

  I explained the situation and he replied with crying-laughing emojis. Please get a picture of the sombrero. Will she let you take a selfie in it? It was on Louise’s lap, which meant it was half on mine, so I snapped a surreptitious picture of it. Not that it mattered. Louise was deep in conversation with the Uber driver about her hysterectomy.

  When we eventually arrived at the airport, I helped everyone get their bags out of the car and then went back to the Uber driver. “I am so, so sorry about this.”

  “You’re lucky you still have your grandma,” she said. “She was nice.”

  I wasn’t sure she meant the same woman that I knew, but I thanked her anyway.

  We got my grandmother to her pre-reserved wheelchair inside the terminal, and I was pleased to find that it came with a porter to push her. “This is silly,” she told the porter. “I can walk just fine.”

  “Happy to do it, ma’am,” he said.

  “Here, Evelyn, will you hold my sombrero since you’re in the chair?”

  “Why don’t you just wear it?” my grandmother asked Louise.

  “Inside?”

  “It’s vacation!”

  “True,” she said, putting it on. “We’ll have to get you one down there too.”

  “Where’s Ken’s?”

  “He’s so vain about his hair, he won’t wear it.”

  I looked at Ken’s thin, gray hair. But at least he still had hair, which was worth showing off at his age.

  “Let’s get our bags checked and go through security, then you two can worry about hats.” I guided them toward the check-in desk.

  Checking the bags was easy. Security was a different matter. “What’s taking so long?” my grandmother asked.

  “You have to take off your shoes and take all of the liquids out of your bag,” I explained. “It means security takes longer.”

  “I’m not taking off my shoes.”

  “Everyone does. It’s the law now.”

  “Since when?”

  I outlined the brief history of terrorism to my grandmother and her friends, who apparently were last frequent fliers in the 1960s. I prayed none of them tried to smoke on the airplane.

  “I have to take off my shoes because they think I have a bomb?”

  “Shh, Grandma, you’re not supposed to say ‘bomb’ at the airport.”

  “Now I know you’re making this up, Joan. I’ll prove it to you. Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb!” She looked at me defiantly. “What are they going to do? Arrest me?”

  “Yes,” I said through gritted teeth. “They are. So please just stop.”

  “You’re so serious.” She turned to Louise. “How did I wind up with such a serious grandchild?”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Louise said mildly. “But my Billy is the same way.” “Her Billy” was a thirty-eight-year-old proctologist who had gone by William since he was nine.

  Louise and Ken removed their shoes when it was time. My grandmother didn’t. And because she was in a wheelchair, no one said a word. She smirked at me triumphantly. I just shook my head and went to get a gigantic coffee as soon as I had deposited the three of them at our gate.

  We had almost an hour left until takeoff. Armed with enough caffeine to face the elderly again, I started drafting a blog post from my phone.

  This is gold, I thought as I typed. Everyone will think it’s fiction, but damn, it’s good material.

  I proofread quickly and posted it, just before they started preboarding.

  My father was right about the benefits of having Ken and Louise on the plane. The three of them sat in a row together, leaving me twenty-two glorious inches of aisle freedom. And because none of them would willingly wear their hearing aids or admit that they couldn’t hear without them, conversation across that great divide proved futile.

  I put in my earphones, pulled out my Kindle, and for the first time in weeks felt myself begin to relax.

  When the time came to fill out the paperwork for entering Mexico, I leaned across the aisle and told my grandmother I would fill hers out for her. “Thank you, Joanie,” she said. “Your grandfather always did that.”

  “No problem, Grandma.” I had given up correcting her on my name. I filled in the necessary information, and as soon as we had landed, I turned airplane mode off on my phone.

  It took a minute to connect to the Mexican LTE signal. When it finally did, I began downloading my emails. There were thirty-two of them to my personal account.

  Oh God, I thought. What fresh hell is going on with the wicked bridesmaids of the west now?

  But none of them were about Caryn’s shower or bachelorette party. Instead there were seventeen likes on the blog post, and nine comments and six new followers on my blog.

  I felt a rush of nervous excitement. The highest number of comments I had gotten on a post so far was four, and that had taken almost two weeks to accomplish. I scrolled through.

  “Hysterical!”

  “Oh my God, please update this with more.”

  “Is this for real? Which airport just let her through security like that?”

  “Can your grandma be my friend? I want to be exactly like her.”

  “Why do I need a passport? Classic!”

  And so on.

  I checked the blog stats and saw a lot of the new traffic was coming from social media sites, which meant people had started sharing it with their friends. I smiled broadly as another email came in.

  Not that I could bask in that glory for long, because getting my grandmother and her friends through customs proved challenging, as Ken and Louise were stopped for discrepancies on their customs forms.

  “Here,” Louise said to my grandmother. “Just take my purse through for me. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  We’re going to Mexican prison, I thought, handing Louise back her bag.

  “What’s wrong with you?” my grandmother asked. “I carry stuff for other people all the time.”

  “Through customs?”

  “Sure.”

  I pressed my fingers to my temples to fight the emerging stress headache and then pushed her wheelchair to the other side to wait. Hopefully the resort has massages. I’ll charge it to the room. My parents owe me.

  “That’s a mistake,” I told the man at the front desk. “We have two separate rooms.”

  He checked his computer screen again, and then gestured for a woman to come over.

  “What seems to be the problem?” she asked in lightly accented English.

  “My grandmother and I are supposed to have separate rooms.”

  The woman checked the computer screen and tapped the keyboard a few times. “No,” she said. “It says right here that you’re booked into a junior king suite together.”

  “All set?” my grandmother asked, wandering back over. She already had some kind of tropical drink with six pieces of fruit stacked on a skewer and a straw with an umbrella.

  “No,” I said, then turned back to the woman behind the desk. “You need to fix this. We need two separate rooms.”

  “Oh,” Grandma said. “I called the agent and said I was rooming with you.”

  “You did what?”

  “Why should we pay for two rooms? It’s not like you have a date.” She took a sip of her drink. “If you want to bring a man back to the room, just tell me and I’ll go to the pool or Ken and Louise’s room for a bit.” My mouth dropped open in shock. “What? We’re on vacation.”

  “We need two rooms,” I said to the desk clerk, who had the good sense to wipe the look of enjoyment off her face.

  “Everything is booked, I’m afraid. We have eight weddings and three anniversary parties this weekend.”

  My grandmother smiled at me. “Hi, roomie.”

  Well, dear readers, I have hit rock bottom. I am no longer dateless at my younger brother’s tropical destination wedding. Instead, my date is my eighty-eight-year-old grandmother, who cancelled her reservation for a separate room without telling me.<
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  As I write this, she is sitting naked in a heart-shaped hot tub in our room, drinking some kind of daiquiri (her third!), and watching a telenovela with English subtitles. I was called a prude for asking if she could please put her bathing suit on. The room has a single king-size bed and a foldout sofa, which she told me I was a fool for planning to sleep on instead of sharing the bed with her because it would destroy my back. And by the way, she sleeps in the nude too.

  Sofa bed it is.

  And because it wouldn’t truly be rock bottom without the implication of my promiscuity in front of random strangers, she told me at the reception desk to just let her know (Via sock on the door, maybe? Apparently my grandmother is cooler than I am too. Another dagger to the heart!) if I wanted to bring a gentleman caller back to the room for a visit and she would make herself scarce. Which brings me to my next greatest fear: that I will return from the rehearsal dinner tonight to one of her compression socks on the door.

  At which point will all of Mexico’s great tequila wash that vision from my eyes?

  Stay tuned. I’m sure saying “I’ve hit rock bottom” is the same as saying, “I’ll be right back” in a horror movie and something inherently worse is about to happen.

  “Joan!” my grandmother called to me from the hot tub. I had taken my laptop out to the balcony to write a new post as soon as she began stripping to climb into the tub. “Can you call room service? I need another dirty monkey.”

  She’s requesting another drink, I wrote. So I have to sign off. Wish me luck!

  I hit “Publish,” then told her I would.

  Ah, so your grandma has reached the stage of life where she doesn’t give a fuck, Alex texted when I told him what was going on.

  Less than zero fucks given. But she told me to just let her know if I want to bring a guy back and she’ll go hang out by the pool.

  He replied with three crying-laughing emojis.

  I should have just lied and said you and I were together so I wouldn’t have to come to this alone, I said.

  The three dots appeared to show he was typing, then they disappeared. The delay was long enough that I wondered if I shouldn’t have said that. The connotation of us sharing a room in Mexico could have been less than platonic, after all.

  Next time, he finally wrote.

  Next time one of my siblings gets married in Mexico?

  Yeah.

  You’re so helpful right now.

  He replied with a winking face, which seemed to end the conversation. If I misspoke, I misspoke. I couldn’t deal with more drama, not with the rehearsal dinner that night and wedding the next day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I yawned as the stylist curled my hair around the wand. My mother apparently inherited her tendency to snore from her mother, and the snores had continued until five, when my grandmother woke to do her “calisthenics,” which as far as I could tell consisted of her standing on the balcony in a bathrobe and drinking a cup of black coffee that she brewed next to my head on the pullout sofa. Not the restful night’s sleep at an all-inclusive resort in Mexico that I had envisioned, but I was glad she had put on the robe.

  And at least they had a real coffee bar at the resort. It wasn’t Starbucks, but it was an iced latte with vanilla. I took another sip and wondered if room service delivered refills to the resort’s salon as well.

  I had hardly even seen the bride. She said a quick hello at the rehearsal dinner the night before, but that was it. She seemed a bit more effusive with her family and friends, but I only witnessed that from afar.

  She looked really happy, though, across the salon, as a makeup artist shellacked her final product into place. Truly, genuinely happy. You watch all of these movies and TV shows where the bride is nervous or crying before her wedding and you forget that this look of pure happiness is how it’s supposed to be. I should use that, I thought, pulling out my phone.

  I opened the WordPress app to start a new post, then paused. I had a hundred and seventeen notifications.

  That couldn’t be right. I clicked over to the notifications tab—thirty-nine likes on the post from the previous day about my grandmother, forty-two on the one about sharing a room with her, nineteen new followers to my blog, and seventeen comments.

  Excitement prickled along my spine as I scrolled through the comments.

  “This is fake, right?”

  “It’s like a train wreck and I can’t look away.”

  “Girl! Your grandma is gonna kill you if she reads this!” (I’ll admit, that one gave me pause. Then again, my grandmother’s grasp of the internet was tenuous at best—she thought it was called “the Google.” And I couldn’t see her trolling wedding blogs in her spare time.)

  “You seriously say everything I wish I could about being in a wedding.”

  “LMAOOOOOOO.”

  “If you come home to a sock on that door, I’m going to die.”

  “What happens to grandma in Mexico stays in Mexico . . .”

  “Yaaaaas girl, keep that snark coming!”

  “Imma sit right here and wait to see what granny does next.” With a GIF of Michael Jackson eating popcorn.

  I realized I was grinning broadly and looked around surreptitiously to make sure no one had noticed. The only one looking at me was my grandmother, and her eyes narrowed as she pursed her lips. I felt a wave of guilt. Did she know somehow? Had she gone through my phone while I was in the shower?

  She sipped more of her mimosa, and I laughed off the thought. My grandmother’s iPhone was the last one in existence without a passcode because she had locked her previous phone for 556 days trying to figure it out. There was no way she had gotten into mine.

  Another notification came in, and I smiled again, clicking over to the new post tab.

  You forget that a wedding is actually about being happy, I started, then stopped. I had followers now. People who would get notifications when I posted something. Would they stick around if I wrote a sweet post? No way. They came for the snark, and it was my job to deliver.

  I glanced back at Madison. Her makeup done, she had come to sit next to my grandmother, saying something that looked ridiculously genuine. But was there anything to say about Madison that was snarky? She was . . . sweet. Not simperingly, sickeningly so, but just a nice Midwestern girl without an ounce of my sardonic humor.

  I couldn’t annihilate her on the internet.

  But the blog wasn’t really about the brides. It was about me and my experiences in their weddings. They were supporting cast at best. I hadn’t realized that before, and it was empowering because it was the first thing all year that had been about me, not them.

  I was still thinking about what I would write when they called me to get my makeup done. And by the time I was finished, we had to do photos and then go to the wedding itself, so I was out of time. I can sneak away for a little during the reception, I thought. After I walked down the aisle in my yellow dress, my job was done until it was time to get my grandma on the plane back home. And Ken and Louise, apparently, as they would be on our return flight and sharing our Uber back to my grandmother’s house as well.

  I felt a twinge of legitimate envy watching the ceremony. Jake was grinning ear to ear while he waited for Madison to come down the aisle, and I was close enough to hear him tell her that she was “so beautiful” when she reached him. He held her hand through the ceremony, and I saw my mother crying unabashedly during their vows, when he promised to love her unconditionally for the rest of their lives.

  My mother had never shed tears of joy over me. Of anxiety, irritation, and anger? Sure. But joyous tears? And the way Jake and Madison looked at each other—they could have been the only ones there. No one had ever looked at me like that. Here I was, five years older than Jake, and he had found this level of happiness that I didn’t think I was capable of. What was wrong with me?

  Then it was over. Jake stomped on a cloth-wrapped glass, despite having an otherwise nondenominational ceremony, everyone cheer
ed, and it was time for more pictures, then the cocktail hour.

  I got a glass of champagne and set it on a table to check my phone for more notifications. There were twelve. I was reading the comments when my grandmother sidled up to me, another slushy, tropical drink in her hand.

  “Who’s the fella?”

  I looked up in shock. I hadn’t seen her coming and had no idea what she was talking about. “What?”

  “I saw you smiling at that phone. So who is he?”

  “No one.”

  She poked me in the ribs with a bony finger. “Don’t you lie to me, Joanie. I’ve known you your whole life.”

  “Lily, Grandma. And no guy. I was just reading something—funny.”

  She gave me a sly look that told me she didn’t believe a word I said. “Don’t drag me all the way to a foreign country for your wedding, please. I’m too old and it’s too hot.”

  I sighed. “I promise, I’m not getting married. Probably ever, at this rate.”

  “Is it a girl then?” My mouth dropped open. “What? It’s legal now. No one said you had to marry a boy.”

  “Grandma!”

  “Just promise me it’ll be closer to home.”

  I closed my eyes and counted to ten. “Okay. First of all, I’m straight. Second, I’m single. Third, I have zero marital prospects on the horizon.”

  She shook her head and made a tsk-tsk noise. “We’ll fix that, Joan,” she said, patting my arm reassuringly. Then she called to Louise and made her way to her friend as fast as her bad hip would allow.

  That woman is going to be the death of me, I thought, drinking the rest of my champagne and going back to my phone.

  Jake and Madison had a sweetheart table, so I was seated with Amy, Tyler, my parents, my grandmother, and my aunt and uncle for the meal and toasts, which felt agonizingly slow. I just wanted to find a place to camp out and write a post about what my grandmother had just said, but with my mother’s eyes on me every time I pulled out my phone, that was proving difficult.

  I felt a buzz while Madison’s sister was giving her maid of honor speech, and I glanced down at my phone next to my leg on the seat.