The Plus One

by Sarah Archer

  Outside on the lawn, the bridesmaids were grouped in a chattering ring, the rest of the attendees gathering behind them. Maybe drawn instinctively by the fact that they were all wearing the same thing, Kelly went and took her place with the bridesmaids without even thinking about it. Clara stood in front of them, waving for quiet. “Okay, everybody! Jonathan and I are about to head out”—a groan of protest from the crowd—“Shush, we have a honeymoon in the morning!” Everyone laughed. “But before we go, I want to leave you with one little thing.” From behind her back, she drew her bouquet, all pink and peach and white. “Who’s ready for a bouquet toss?”

  The other bridesmaids squealed, but Kelly shifted to the edge, separating herself from the group. She was in no mood for celebration at the moment. And really, the whole thing irritated her. The bouquet toss was an obvious artifact of the patriarchy, asking women to claw at one another’s throats for the ultimate prize of their lives: a husband. And did anyone in their right mind expect Kelly, with her pronounced lack of athleticism, her sheath dress, and her precarious heels, to lunge like a pole vaulter in front of an army of cameras held by her entire extended family? Like hell.

  “You know what they say,” Clara was continuing, “whoever catches it is the next to get married! So to the lucky girl, let me just say this in advance.” She reached out her left hand and Jonathan stepped over and took it. “I can wish for nothing better than that he makes you as happy as this man makes me.” She and her new husband beamed at each other, the crowd “aww”ed, and in spite of herself, Kelly felt something melt.

  “All right.” Clara turned her back to them, suspending the bouquet above her head. Kelly stepped farther out so as not to be in the way of the other girls, who looked like cheetahs ready to pounce. “One . . . two . . .”

  Among the onlookers, she caught sight of Ethan. He was standing next to Diane, who clutched his arm rather than her husband’s in anticipation, and he patted her hand with a laugh. He found Kelly’s eyes and smiled at her—that endless smile.

  “Three!”

  Kelly did it before she knew she was doing it. When that bouquet hit the air, she flew. She covered more feet in one millisecond than she normally covered in ten. She inadvertently clocked Eleanor in the clavicle with her elbow on the way, skidding to a landing face-first on the damp grass. But when she raised her limp hand from the ground, like a battered prizefighter, the bouquet was in her grasp.

  Kelly had a lot of time to think that night as she cleaned herself up in the bathroom at the venue. After all, wiping mud from a made-up face and scrubbing grass stains from a once elegant, now shredded dress is more than a minute’s work. As she looked at herself in the gilt-framed mirror above the sink, Kelly had to wonder why she’d done it. What could possibly have possessed her to turn her back on her logic, her instincts, her pride, her sociopolitical values, even her dress and long-suffering bathing suit like that? What had taken over her? There was only one possible answer.

  Kelly was falling in love.

  eighteen

  • • • • • •

  Weeks and weeks ago, when Kelly had made Ethan, she had planned to wake bright and early this morning and hit the ground running. In reality, she woke with the acute awareness that the previous night she had hit the ground—running. Her whole body felt like she’d just been squeezed through a fax machine on a transmission to hell. Groggily raising an arm over her head to examine it, she saw a mosaic of bruises and scratches. It didn’t help that she was hungover.

  She felt around on the nightstand for her phone, eyes half closed. And there it was on the screen, a pop-up reminder of her calendar appointment in bold red letters: “You Know What.” It was time to smuggle Ethan into the lab, counting on AHI being sleepy on a Sunday, and dismantle him for good.

  She looked across at his sleeping face on the other pillow, lit by the milky half-light of morning. The thought of waking him up and telling him she had to take him to the lab to destroy him was so unthinkable that she would have laughed if her frustration weren’t so deep. Why did it have to end? Why couldn’t she and Ethan just . . . stay together? The threat of his origin being discovered at work would continue to hang over her head, but the more liberated Kelly felt, the less lethal that particular sword appeared to be. The thought of being able to just be with Ethan—no expiration date, no rules, no shame—was so enticing, so relieving, that Kelly felt a tear sneak from her right eye and trickle its way across her temple as she lay on her back. She brushed it into her hair.

  Yet she had made that appointment—in bold, in red—for a reason. Kelly had to get rid of Ethan. The only island of shelter in her reckless plan had been the promise of ending said plan. Really, she was shockingly lucky that no one had figured out what she had done so far. She had made Ethan because she had needed a wedding date, and now the wedding was over and he had served his purpose beautifully. Mischief managed. What more could she ask for?

  She pressed herself back down into the pillow, chewing her lip. More time, for one thing. She just needed more time and then she would be ready to let him go. She had promised herself she would get rid of Ethan after the wedding. But one could argue that “the wedding” left some space for negotiation. After all, which wedding was not specified, she reasoned. She wasn’t so much breaking the rule as bending it, right? Rule yoga.

  She exed out the calendar appointment on her phone and sat up. She had an idea.

  * * *

  • • •

  Kelly went to her mother’s bridal shop having steeled herself with a good, stiff herbal tea. She had slipped out of the apartment, avoiding saying good-bye to Ethan. She was going to tell Diane that Ethan was moving away for work, that she and he were breaking up. Then there would be no going back—she’d be forced to get rid of him. Besides, it made beautifully symmetrical sense to use her mother to catalyze the end of everything.

  Kelly felt all sorts of twinges as she stepped into her mother’s bridal shop that were probably half nerves, half sore ligaments. But then, she never felt comfortable here. The whole place was just so Diane. Various wedding trinkets cluttered ivory-painted tables throughout the space: tiaras, silk flower arrangements, planning notebooks and magazines, a rack of dangling earrings that jiggled and clinked whenever somebody walked past. But the real business of the store was the dresses, their folds of rich satin and ice-blue jewels arrayed on carefully placed racks and glinting out from lit alcoves around the walls. Kelly found the atmosphere claustrophobic, indulgent, and oppressively pretty. But based on the delighted squeals whenever brides-to-be entered the shop, she supposed her mother was doing something right.

  While Diane ordered most of her gowns from designers, every year she put her knowledge as a seamstress to use by designing and crafting one dress from scratch. Aside from creating a centerpiece and talking point for the showroom and selling customers on her alteration skills, Kelly suspected that the real reason Diane made these dresses was to bring to life the gown that she herself had always wanted and never gotten to wear. Invariably, she made a princess-type ballgown, and every year that Kelly could remember, the dresses seemed to have gotten bigger and bigger. This year’s featured a silver-crystal-covered bodice that looked ludicrously small atop a skirt made of a Costco-sized, nay, a Walmart-sized, nay, a Walmart Supercenter–sized quantity of tulle.

  Kelly squeezed past this tulle now to find her mother behind the register. “Kelly!” Diane cried before Kelly could open her mouth. “I’m so glad you’re here, did you see Clara’s Instagram? The picture of her and Jonathan getting on the plane for the honeymoon? Just so absolutely adorable, they were holding hands, you have to see, oh, where is it?”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “No, no, I just had it,” Diane said, tapping away at her phone. Kelly was anxious just to get this over with. The more she delayed, the more she felt herself losing her nerve, becoming all flight, no fight. “Oh here
—no, wait, that’s not it, that’s a recipe for meatloaf. I’m thinking of trying pudding mix as a thickener instead of breadcrumbs. The Food Network had this whole thing about sweet and savory.” Diane went back to scrolling.

  “I don’t have a ton of time, Mom, I just came here to talk about Ethan.”

  “Oh no.” Diane looked up at Kelly with an expression somewhere between horror and resignation, setting down her phone. “He dumped you.”

  “He—no, why is that the first thing you assume?”

  “Is he cheating on you? Did you fight last night? You looked so cute together yesterday. Kelly, Kelly,” Diane groaned, the rings on her fingers clinking together as she wrung her hands. “You had such a good thing. Who knows when a man like Ethan will come around again? You’re thirty now, thirty!”

  “That’s not even that old! Do you know how few of the people my age I know are married yet?”

  “My dear, society changes all the time, it doesn’t change biology.”

  “It allows us to not be ruled by it.” Getting fired up, Kelly had momentarily forgotten her mission. “I’m not going to structure my life choices around some antiquated time line. I’m still figuring things out.”

  Diane’s hands transferred to her hips. “Well, you better figure fast. Say you go out there tomorrow and start dating again. Say within a year, you meet Mr. Right. You date for another year before getting engaged. You’re engaged for a year before getting married. Then, of course, you want to spend some time together, just the two of you, before you throw kids into the mix and never look at each other again unless it’s over a diaper pail or a pack of cigarettes fished out of the back of a sixteen-year-old’s closet, so you take a couple years. Then you start trying to have children, but you can’t count on it happening right away, after all, it took your Grandma Rose six years and you got her nose and who knows what else, and you want two kids, naturally, loners turn into sociopaths, so a year for each pregnancy and a year in between, and by this point you’re nearly fifty and the only two eggs you have left give you a choice of Down syndrome or a one-legger, so you spend your retirement years caring for an invalid and die of old age when he’s only eighteen, thrusting him on the mercies of a merciless society. And that’s the best-case scenario time line.”

  Kelly reeled, not least from her mom describing her future grandchild as a “one-legger.” In spite of all the risible points of her mother’s argument, and the liberal nature of her math, there was an undeniable truth at the core of her words. Kelly didn’t even know for sure yet if she ever did want to get married, or have kids of her own, and she disliked the feeling of society forcing her hand in those choices. But if she did want those things, that was probably a decision that she needed to start thinking about, like, yesterday. She anxiously flicked a silvery “bride” key chain dangling at the register. The feeling of being behind the curve, of being negligent, did not sit well with her.

  “Well, thanks for assuming that I fouled things up, but Ethan’s actually quite happy with me,” Kelly bristled.

  “Well, all right then, that’s wonderful,” Diane replied. “That’s very nice. I’m glad you two are happy together.”

  “We are.”

  “All right then.”

  “All right.”

  Her mom’s expression was wholly unconvinced. “And what was it you came to tell me?” she asked.

  Kelly opened her mouth, but stalled. The words “He’s leaving” couldn’t quite make it past her lips now. Her mother’s warnings looped through her mind. She’d always been a girl who spent more time fantasizing about going to the moon or having a robot dog as a pet than about wearing a fluffy wedding gown. But after yesterday, seeing Clara and Jonathan together, seeing Ethan with her family, feeling the warm solidity of his arm under her hand as they walked down the aisle together at the end of the ceremony—maybe she could see a place in her life for marriage. And try as she might, she couldn’t see her life without a place for Ethan.

  Her eyes darted around the room. They landed on a bridal magazine displayed at the register beside the rack of key chains. A hefty engagement ring loomed out from the front cover, underlined by the headline “The Ultimate Bond.” Kelly spoke before she thought.

  “We’re getting married,” she said.

  * * *

  • • •

  Years ago, for Diane and Carl’s fifteenth anniversary, they took the family out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, meaning it had cloth napkins and no photographs of the food on the menu. It may seem a little odd that they brought their three kids along on a romantic anniversary date, but they did so every year, so Kelly thought nothing of it. If she had thought about it, and had been older than ten at the time, she may have realized that for her mom and dad, asking them to share a table alone together for an hour and concoct an adult conversation would have been like asking them to build a shuttle and pilot it to Mars. As it was, all Kelly was thinking of at the time was when the crab dip was going to arrive and how she could consume all of it before everyone else at the table noticed it was gone.

  The family was laughing, regaled by Clara’s enthusiastic impression of the rabbit her class was raising. Diane stretched slightly out of her chair, eyes sparkling. “Well, is it time for presents, then?”

  “What’s taking so long on the crab dip?” Carl asked.

  “Carl, you go first! I want mine to be last.”

  “All right, all right.” Carl lifted a poinsettia-adorned, Christmas-themed gift bag from beside him on the booth, passing it across to his wife. Diane eagerly tore through the wrapping and lifted out two economy-sized pump bottles of Kirkland’s own shampoo and conditioner.

  Her smile faltered for just a moment. “Oh my,” she said, “that’s a lot of shampoo.”

  “Now you won’t have to buy it for years,” Carl confirmed.

  “Ooh, Freesia Memory,” she read off the bottle. “I’m going to smell lovely with this.” She patted Carl’s thigh, a bit of her twinkle returning. “Someone wants to get up close and personal.”

  “Best value they had,” Carl replied. “And I know you like the pump top.”

  “Let me smell, Mommy.” Their mom passed the bottles over to Clara and pulled a legal-sized envelope from her purse. The front had been decorated with swirling pink hearts and stickers of flowers. She held it protectively to her, as if trying to keep it from Carl’s nonexistent eager grasp. Carl calmly sipped his beer.

  “Now, this year I wanted to do something really special, seeing as it is The Big Fifteen. I splurged a bit, but it’s an investment, a long-term one—well, you don’t even know how long term! Go ahead, you’ll see.” She released the envelope into Carl’s hand and watched as he laboriously unwound the thread of the clasp—around, and around, and around. When he finally got inside, he pulled out a sheaf of paper—white on top, yellow carbon copy on the back. He fished his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and squinted at the page. “West Lawn Memorial Cemetery?”

  “I got us a joint plot!” Diane exclaimed. “They’re not easy to come by, but I thought it was worth it. You have to wait for another couple to disintegrate or something.” She reached across and took his hand. “After fifteen wonderful years, I wanted to make sure we’ll be together forever.”

  “Creepy . . .” Gary whispered, eyes rounded in awe.

  “How much did this cost?” Carl frowned.

  Diane’s eyes flickered to the children. “Oh, come on, we don’t have to talk about that stuff now. It’s our anniversary dinner, we should be celebrating!”

  “What, the fact that even in death, we can’t escape each other?”

  “Don’t joke like that, Carl,” Diane said lightly. She pulled a pen from her purse. “Here. They need both our signatures, so you just have to add yours and we’ll be good to go. It’s a beautiful spot; I can’t wait to show you. There’s the sweetest little statue of a cherub near
by—”

  “I’m not signing.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to sign this.” Carl slid the contract back into the envelope and set it down beside the breadbasket. “Can we just have dinner in peace? Apparently, it’s the only peace I’ll get in this life or the next.”

  For once, Diane said nothing. She took the envelope and put it quietly back in her purse, looking down. But just then the waitress arrived, sliding the crab dip onto the table with a pot holder. She nodded at the gift wrap. “What are we celebrating?”

  Diane looked up, her face suddenly a brilliant smile. “Our fifteenth anniversary.” She rested her hand over Carl’s on the table.

  “Wow, congratulations! Fifteen years, what’s the secret?”

  “Just love,” Diane said simply. Carl looked carefully down at his silverware.

  The entire rest of that evening—all through dinner, even the ride home—the whole family was silent. Even accounting for Diane eating, this was the most Kelly had ever seen her mom keep her mouth closed. And even Carl, who normally hunted down pockets of silence like a hound after a fox, seemed uncomfortable. As for herself, Kelly found the much-anticipated dip hard to swallow.

  As they rode home in the family’s Suburban, the kids lined up in the back, eyes down, afraid to even look at one another, Kelly had a stark realization: her parents were going to fight tonight. They both wanted to scream at each other, to say awful things, but they were holding it in all evening to protect her and her siblings. They couldn’t say anything without yelling, so they wouldn’t say anything at all.

  Kelly brushed her teeth quickly that night and scuttled back to her and Clara’s room. She wanted the shelter of her own space, but more than that, she wanted to hear. A masochistic fascination, a dread mingled with enthusiasm, led her to not want to miss a word of her parents’ explosive argument. And Clara clearly felt the same way: the girls exchanged one glance, then piled together on Clara’s bed, which shared a wall with their parents’ room. From there, they would hear everything.