The Plus One

by Sarah Archer

  And fret Kelly did. It was one thing to watch her mom’s eyes light up as she discussed concepts for signature cocktails, bite bars, and leisuretainment, whatever those things were, it was quite another to hear her start to talk about putting down deposits. While she couldn’t yet bring herself to call off the wedding, maybe she could delay it—keep Diane from getting overinvolved and overinvested, and buy herself some time to figure out what she was going to do about Ethan.

  Kelly was reporting the next weekend to the command center, aka her mom’s store, expecting to be blinded by the usual wash of white, but what caught her eye instead was a pop of orange: a very spray-tanned man was perched on the edge of the counter, talking to Diane. It was his signature style—a pocket square and bow tie that were inverses of the same pattern—that Kelly recognized. She couldn’t remember his name, but knew that he was a celebrity wedding planner in Los Angeles with his own TV show. The punchy song of the intro flitted into her head. This guy was big business. She couldn’t imagine what he was doing here. Had Diane won some sort of sweepstakes, like a charity thing for owners of little bridal boutiques?

  But the man nudged Diane as Kelly entered. “I should get out of your hair, Di, you’ve got a customer.” Even Kelly’s dad didn’t call her mom “Di.” The man whispered loudly enough that Kelly heard. “This little pigeon looks scared.”

  “That’s just Kelly,” Diane assured him, sweeping over to bring Kelly in. “This is my daughter. Guess what she’s here for—I’m planning her wedding!”

  “Well, aren’t you just the luckiest little chick in the world, having Di do your wedding!” he gushed. Kelly didn’t know whether to be more confused about the fact that this celebrity planner was on a nickname basis with her mother or the fact that he seemed to think she was some TBD breed of bird.

  “Yeah, it’s—hi, I’m Kelly,” she finished in a backward sort of way. “You know my mom?”

  “Mick knows far too much about me,” her mother laughed, brushing his elbow playfully. Now Kelly saw his name flash up in the show’s credits in her mind’s eye—Mick Santese.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t slip any secrets in front of the baby,” he assured her. “I’m up here in the hinterlands for the day, so of course I had to find out what Diane knows about this new shoe designer who’s buzzing in my bonnet. Nothing good, it sounds like.”

  “You didn’t hear it from me.” Diane smiled.

  Kelly realized that her mouth was hanging slightly open as she looked between her mom and Mick. It wasn’t her best look. “I didn’t realize you two were friends,” she said finally, making a conscious effort to close her mouth when she was done.

  “For a decade. You didn’t know that?” Diane replied. “Mick used one of my designs just last season on his show.”

  “Really?” Kelly asked. Maybe it came out sounding more doubtful than she had intended. Diane looked at her sharply.

  “Really,” she returned. “I do all right, you know. We can’t all be robot scientists, but it’s good enough for me.” She turned to Mick. “By the way, how is Raif doing?”

  Kelly struggled to process while they chatted. She didn’t know much about the wedding industry, but she knew that if Mick Santese was asking her mom’s advice, that must mean that her mom was good at what she did. Not just good, but excellent. She realized that she had never really thought of her mother as a career woman. Maybe because Diane’s career revolved around the home sector, Kelly had failed to see it as a career at all. She had always resented her family’s lack of comprehension of her own hard-won business success. Was it possible that her mother felt exactly the same way?

  “Winter.” A sudden proclamation from Mick, aimed in her direction, snapped her out of her thoughts. He was looking at her appraisingly, his eyebrows utterly motionless as he squinted his eyes.

  Diane glowed. “Christmas,” she confirmed. She looped an arm through Kelly’s. “We’re already narrowing in on a venue.”

  “Ah.” Mick threw up his hands in mock exasperation. “You’re too good! Too good!”

  Kelly pulled her arm out uncomfortably. “I actually wanted to talk to you about that, Mom. Ethan and I just want to take it slowly, have a long engagement, maybe think about, I don’t know, next summer instead . . .”

  Diane and Mick exchanged a look full of the sort of wearied amusement that suggested Kelly had just declared that she wanted to be a fairy princess. “A long engagement—” Diane began.

  “—is asking for second thoughts,” Mick finished. “No, no, no, it’s got to be winter. You couldn’t be more of a winter if you rode in here on a snowflake.”

  “But—” Kelly tried.

  “What are you afraid of, chickie? You’re in good hands. Di will have everything ready in time. This isn’t her first rodeo.” He nudged Diane teasingly.

  “Really, dear, don’t you think I know what I’m doing?” Diane asked Kelly. They were both staring at her expectantly. What else could she say?

  “Of course. This winter is great.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Kelly had gotten home early from work and was looking forward to a relaxing evening of watching women cry as their dearest family members told them they looked fat while trying on wedding dresses. But she was only half watching the woman doing the ugly cry onscreen, because as soon as her butt had touched the couch, Gary had called.

  “He asked me at our favorite restaurant,” she was saying. Gary had called, but it had really been Bertie, Emma, and Hazel who wanted to talk to her. Ever since Kelly had recounted her “proposal” at family dinner, this particular story seemed to have usurped the mythic place of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty in their imaginations. She was now reciting it for the third time in a row. “He had the waiter hide the ring in my dessert.”

  “What dessert? What dessert?” Bertie cried through the phone.

  “Strawberry cheesecake. I had to lick all the strawberry sauce off the ring.”

  “And then?” Hazel demanded.

  “Then he stood up and got down on one knee and said, ‘Will you marry me, Kelly?’ And all the other customers were watching, so when I said yes, everyone clapped.” She cast an eye back at Ethan, who was reading quietly on her e-reader. He knew that she was carrying on the ruse of a fake wedding, and had said absolutely nothing against it. Still, she felt unaccountably embarrassed telling this story in front of him.

  “Again! Again!” Hazel exclaimed.

  “Again? Isn’t it past your bedtime, little lady?”

  She heard Gary’s voice yell through on speakerphone: “One more time! I’d rather hear you than another Baby Einstein video right now.”

  Kelly sighed. “So Ethan told me he was taking me out to dinner, but he didn’t say where . . .” She truly couldn’t fathom why even a trio of children would be so captivated by this story. A ring in the dessert? She had gone with this story at first because it was the first one that popped into her head. But every time she had to tell it to someone, it felt more silly, more cliché, more inauthentic. She felt increasingly embarrassed that she hadn’t at least come up with a better lie.

  “Again!” Bertie cried as Kelly wrapped up the story once more, but she resisted.

  “No more tonight, Bertie,” she said firmly. “Aunt Kelly’s talked enough.” She thought she saw Ethan’s eyes flick up at her wearied face as she ended the call.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next night, Kelly hauled herself back into the apartment, exhausted from another difficult day with Confibot. Strangely, the lights in the apartment were out. She flicked them on and headed toward the kitchen, but Ethan’s voice cried out to her.

  “Stop! Turn the lights back out.”

  Confused, she complied. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, but when they did, she noticed some kind of glowing green smattered across the walls. It looked li
ke she had walked into the aftermath of a Ghostbusters scene—this could not be good. Then, from the darkness, stars resolved, the little plastic, five-pointed kind kids sometimes stick on their ceilings. They striped the walls of the living room in clusters, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be constellations.

  “What is this?” Kelly called out. Maybe it was just because of the darkness, but she couldn’t spot him anywhere in the main living area.

  “Just read them,” his voice replied.

  Kelly was confused, until she noticed her name spelled out in stars along the hallway leading into her bedroom. She approached the room, reading off the words under her breath, “Kelly, will you . . .”

  She entered the bedroom to find Ethan, who was suddenly illuminated by a swirl of stars. Beside him was a revolving star projector light—he must have switched it on just as she entered.

  “Will you—” he began, then stopped. “Oops, sorry.” He lowered himself to one knee. “Kelly, will you marry me?”

  In many moments of Kelly’s life, small and especially meaningful ones, her brain lit up with a whirl of anxious thoughts, more frantic than the tornado of phantom stars above. But now, there was only one thing in her mind.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Oh good,” Ethan said with relief, standing. “I hope you don’t mind what I did to the apartment, I’ll clean it up, I just knew that it would be easier for you if you had a real proposal story and I wanted to give you one—”

  All Kelly could do was rush at him, grab him, and shut up his stupid wonderful talking mouth with a kiss.

  * * *

  • • •

  “So why the stars?” she asked him later that night. She would never have imagined this scenario in her quest to invent an engagement story. She saw now that the problem with all the other stories she had told was that they were about Ethan, but they hadn’t come from him.

  Ethan shrugged. “It seemed appropriate. When I think of stars, I think of you.”

  “Same here,” Kelly said, snuggling back against him as they lounged in bed, still watching the citrus-colored light washing over the ceiling. “You’re the one who showed them all to me.”

  “Oh no.” Ethan stiffened a little, looking as if he was struggling to understand something. “It’s the opposite. Before you, I had never even seen the stars.”

  twenty-one

  • • • • • •

  Kelly might have lost the battle to tame her mother’s urge to build a winter wedding mood board, but there was one more person whom she could still warn off throwing herself into this wedding full tilt. And so as Kelly headed to the dry cleaner’s on a Saturday, driving past strip malls full of nail salons and taquerias, she called up Clara. She hesitated for an instant before starting with, “What are you doing?”

  “Just heading into work,” replied Clara.

  “Really? You don’t usually work on Saturdays.”

  “It’s busy season. And I wanted to get out of the house. So what’s up?” Clara’s voice had an edge to it that wasn’t usually there, something hurried and verging on testy.

  “It’s about the wedding. You know how Mom’s crazy with this stuff, and she’s determined to plan everything right now, even though we don’t even have an official date, so she’s starting to get into bridesmaid outfits and all that, and with you as the maid of honor, or matron, which sounds hideous, so let’s say ‘maid’—you would still want to be maid of honor, right? I know you always said you would.” Kelly finished with a sudden nervous laugh.

  “Sure, of course.”

  “Right. She’s already thinking about asking the wedding party to buy shoes and everything, and I just wanted to get to you first and tell you to hold off. All of this is premature. So don’t let her hassle you into buying hundred-dollar shoes or let her show up at your place at midnight for a dress fitting or anything crazy like that.” Kelly knew that Clara loved her job at a vintage boutique, but also that it didn’t pay well. She hated to think of her wasting money on the non-wedding.

  “Right, I won’t.”

  After a strained pause, Kelly tumbled on. “It’s just that I know how much you love this wedding stuff and how excited you get, and I appreciate your help in advance, but just don’t get too into it, okay? You don’t need to do that much.”

  “Oh good,” Clara said, relief making her voice animated for the first time in the call. “Because I was meaning to tell you, I just don’t have that much time right now to give to the wedding, between work and—and everything. And I don’t have much money, since I just spent a ton on my own wedding. So this actually helps me out.”

  “Oh.” Kelly felt unaccountably disappointed. She didn’t want Clara dispensing time and money into the wedding, but that didn’t mean she wanted Clara not to want to. “Are you—aren’t you excited at all about it?”

  “Of course I am, Kel,” Clara said hurriedly. “I just pulled up at work, can we talk later?”

  “Sure. I mean, we don’t really need to, I guess.”

  “Okay. Bye, Kel.” Clara was gone. Kelly looked at the phone in her hand in confusion. What had happened to her bubbly little sister? Was there something going on with her? Was she angry at Kelly? Kelly thought back to her dismissal of the notion that Clara would take offense at Kelly announcing her own engagement the day after her wedding. It seemed uncommonly petty of her. But maybe Kelly didn’t know her sister as well as she had thought.

  She called Priya while waiting in line at the dry cleaner’s, hoping for some reassurance. But it wasn’t forthcoming. “I just don’t get why Clara not being interested is an issue,” Priya said. “The wedding’s not even happening.”

  “I know, it’s just—” Kelly shifted to pull her ticket out of her purse. “I guess it’s not an issue. I don’t know, we can talk about it Monday.”

  “I’ll try; I’m going to be in meetings with Dr. Hanover most of the day.”

  “Oh. Right. Talk to you whenever, then.” Kelly had never set much store in horoscopes, but when she got off the phone, she wondered if her stars were crossed.

  * * *

  • • •

  Kelly tried to focus on the lines of code on the computer screen in front of her, but it was pretty hard to ignore Confibot on the other side of the room. The robot finally had a face now, but it was every kind of wrong. “Good morning,” he said pleasantly when she entered a command on her computer. Then suddenly his face morphed to an image of profound concern—or was it anger? It was hard to say, but his eyebrows angled with the severity of a mountain peak. “Are you ready for your medications?” Of course, his eyebrows were kind of a mess to start with. And his whole face. His eyes looked too large for his nose, his mouth too wide to be human.

  With less than a month to go until the presentation, Kelly had given in and thrown all her paint on the canvas at once, so to speak. She had chosen every element of how Confibot presented himself to match what seemed best according to her research, micromanaging each intonation and reaction according to the data she had amassed. But the final result was a mishmash of features and expressions. He veered wildly from surprise to care to disappointment, his voice and gestures seeming at every moment to be trying to do too many things at once. She didn’t need a statistical analysis to tell her that the whole thing was a disaster. The more time she spent with Ethan, the more she cared for him and witnessed his intelligence and sensitivity, the more she realized the enormity of the responsibility she bore in designing this new robotic person, and the more she dug into the data, determined to get this right.

  Being with Ethan also made her wonder how she was going so off base with Confibot. She was putting so much more thought and analysis into him than she had into Ethan, whom she had thrown together in a frenzy of instinct and excitement. Shouldn’t Confibot be that much more amazing? Sure, there were differences: Confibot, as a caregiver, had certain
specific functionalities that Ethan lacked, and she had used some of the parts she’d already built for Confibot to create Ethan. But she knew that those factors weren’t enough to explain the disparity.

  Her phone buzzed on her desk. Her mom was texting again. All morning Diane had been asking whether she could count on Priya for a bridesmaid dress fitting that Saturday. Kelly had been avoiding an answer based on the small fact that she had not yet informed Priya that she needed her to pretend to be a bridesmaid. She could only imagine how that conversation would go. Actually, no, she couldn’t. She was trying her hardest not to imagine that specific thing. She ignored the text.

  She entered a search term on her computer and pulled up an article she had bookmarked on vocal registers, skimming through the lines for some sort of answer, something she could grab on to to make an evidence-based decision for Confibot . . .

  Her phone buzzed again. “Oh, come on, Mom,” she muttered, snatching it off the desk. But Diane’s latest text was not about the dress fitting.

  I’m putting a deposit down on a florist.

  “No, no,” Kelly groaned.

  Please hold off, she hurriedly typed. Before she could even set the phone down and look back at her work, it buzzed again.

  We’ve got to lock him in, the man’s a wizard with forsythia. And since you clearly got my other texts, I’ll see Priya on Saturday.

  Kelly dug her fingers into the hair at her temples. She couldn’t manage her own wedding. She couldn’t manage her own project at work. She couldn’t do anything. She looked at her browser, with so many tabs of research open that they extended out beyond the right border of the window, on and on forever. Everything she’d done was wrong. She had to start over.

  She snatched a scalpel from a rack of tools on the wall, stormed over to Confibot, and dug in, cutting his face off with a clean oval line, leaving a ghastly mass of exposed wires surrounding two bulging eyeballs and a set of teeth. “There. That’s better,” she asserted stubbornly. She located the trash can across the room and threw the face into it. It was useless to her; she’d have to start over.