Jason weighed who would be most easily sacrificed to the god who legislated weddings (though he couldn't put his fingers on which these might be) without disrupting the ceremony and therefore upsetting his wife-to-be.
As though a clarion call from on high, he zeroed in on Charlotte's husky contralto boasting to Eleanor of some exploits that she had perpetrated in the years since they had been parted, only gently embellished to underscore her impish heroism. Condemning Charlotte with this quest was nothing against her. He loved her, would always in a way, but she was technically extraneous to the wedding itself.
Alex approached Jason before he could charge her partner with a mission. "Shouldn't you be suited up, sir?" she teased.
"I require considerably less gussying up than a bride," he assured her, though he did consider this something of a shame. He knew that Toni was irritated at being fussed over, but there was still some Disney Princess pleasure in having oneself attended to. If chirping birds and wisecracking rodents could have done it, Jason suspected that Toni would object far less to having her hair pinned up, her cheeks rouged, her nails painted.
"A little eyeliner wouldn't hurt," Alex said, granting him artistic scrutiny that was unnerving. "It would make your eyes pop. Nothing sexier than a guy with popping eyes."
This was the first time that Alex had said anything to make Jason suspect that she was other than ragingly gay, which he considered flattering. Having almost married her lesbian girlfriend, Jason could concede that he might not have the most cisgender male pheromones.
Charlotte was all but fawning on Eleanor. His ex considered flirting with friends (or pestering them, which Charlotte might assume was only fractionally different) to be the basis of a friendship. Eleanor bore this with a smile. Not just a tolerant one, but the smile of meeting again someone whose company they had forgotten they missed.
"The power went out," Jason said. Alex was behind him by now, understanding that something was afoot and not wanting to miss something that might sow chaos where there had been only relaxed fun. (The day itself had not been relaxed, and Alex had served more than her part in weaving order back in.)
Charlotte looked with an analytical eye to the lack of light from the tent. Eleanor regarded it only distantly, something curious but not relevant to her. Alex just plainly did not care except that the groom was presenting this as a problem in the middle of the day, suspecting the ulterior motive before he could get around to making it explicit.
"Charlotte, she of many talents, could you figure this out?" he asked, assuming praise would make the prospect more appealing.
"Many talents," she said. "Not an electrician."
"No," Jason granted. "But you tend to be able to solve puzzles."
She looked toward the dark house, oozing skepticism. "And you assume this is a puzzle?"
"Mystery, then?" he revised. "It is my wedding. Consider this your gift."
"We got you belly dancers," noted Alex.
Alex has called in friends to the house last night, who leaked glitter on every surface. It was an unexpected diversion in which he barely partook, but not, per se, a gift. This would not be the point on which Charlotte would be convinced.
"Seduction was Alex's gift. I need you to deduce," he said. "Check the fuse box. Talk to the owner." Jason pointed at a rustic house across a long yard.
Charlotte held her resistance a moment but then seemed to decide that this would be fun and gave a stiff salute before gamboling off.
Jason lingered. That salute, so close to Eleanor, had startled him. Eleanor seemed unlike herself -- or the self that Jason thought that he had come to know in the years of their friendship. He cared for her still -- possibly loved her better than he could Charlotte because Eleanor did not come with the baggage of having slept with him -- but Jason did not fully feel that he knew her. She had joined the military, been shaped and honed by its rigor. Eleanor had come to his wedding, and he could not feel more grateful than that. Though she had met Toni only once, there was a rhyme to her coming to this wedding now. Jason did not anticipate this rekindling their friendship as it once was. There was nothing to that any longer but the nostalgia that it had been at all.
Jason wanted to say something to his friend who had been lost and found, but what he felt was not so easily put into words. He didn't think that what he could say to Eleanor would matter more than what was left wordless.
Charlotte regarded men like dogs. Nice enough for what they were, pets for people seeing out loyalty and teeth, but she preferred pussycats. Jason was more of a golden retriever to her: shiny, devoted, loving everyone, but bred to be a little goofy.
No. That wasn't fair, particularly at his wedding. Charlotte knew him better than that, better than any woman had aside, she granted, from the one he was about to marry. He might play some part in her not needing a dog in her life (beyond genetic destiny). He satisfied her need for his species. She'd had a good dog and didn't need another to dilute the memory.
However, the task he had given her did not fit his skill set. He had better things to do today. Ask him to write a villanelle about a power outage, and he would do you right. Ask him to resolve it, and you were asking for disappointment or trouble.
She was methodical. Though she was not an electrician, she was, as he said, deductive. The moment Charlotte had accepted that she could do this, it was as though a checklist had materialized before her eyes.
She checked the fuse box first, though only to flick each switch, hoping that some change would be effected.
When that didn't produce results, she asked Alex to join her on a jaunt to the owner's house, which was lit up, television blaring.
She knocked politely, then with something less than politeness, until the door opened. Before her stood a man in his middle fifties, light hair shaved close, weathered skin, and a day's growth of peppery beard. Charlotte's guts tightened, some instinctual reaction between her kind and his. He was the sort of man who would call her a dyke in a bar for turning down his advances, even though he could have fathered her. These were the eyes of someone who would look at her with contempt for holding hands with a woman.
Then he smiled broadly down at her, looking between Alex and her. "Well, you don't look like Girl Scouts. What's up?"
Charlotte gave him the information she had gleaned, what little it was, and pointed toward the house.
"They're a nice couple," he said. "I wish them well." I sniffed deep, those previously threatening eyes (even if they were only threatening by the memory of men who looked like him) kindly. "Well, we can't have them having issues on their wedding day, can we?"
"No, sir," Charlotte said, less playfully than she meant it.
"I'll look into it. Worst case, I got a generator in the barn." He looked down at her again, his smile so warm that Charlotte wanted him to adopt her.
She was reminded of old dogs being taught new tricks and hated herself a little for thinking that.
Jason returned, relaxed in a way that seemed suspicious.
"Status update?" Toni asked her fiance.
"Charlotte -- who is the most expendable by dint of being an interloper and my ex -- went to talk to the owner. He doesn't know why we don't have electricity. What he does have is a gas-powered generator. The problem being both that it would smell like burning gasoline and that it would sound like a gas-powered generator."
She sniffed. "Is that all? No better option?"
"Unless you have a solar generator hiding somewhere, yes, that is presently our best bet."
Toni was not keen to be exchanging vows over the thrum of a generator. That didn't seem to be an issue until night fell. The guests would not be coming inside, thus no reason to keep the air conditioning going. They had no vital life support, only strings of lights that had lost their barely visible twinkle. The speakers were dead, but she could forestall worry about that until it was time for a first dance. Life could go on.
Toni shooed Jason out of the house, resigned that she would have to get turned from a barely disguised tomboy into a bride. As though she could sense this resignation of the transformation, Amy exited the bathroom. This wedding weekend, Amy had become like a biological process of the home, homeostasis that could almost be left to drift into the background, trusting it was fulfilling some higher purpose that did not require conscious intervention. That is, until it happened to be standing in front of one, eyes hazy and downcast as though about to say something shameful.
"Wait."
Toni paused almost startled by the syllable as though Amy had manifested from the natural wood of this rented home. "What's up?"
"You didn't paint your nails last night."
She traced her thumb over her nails, wondering what it mattered. There was so much to be done, especially to her. It seemed easy to have missed one. It spoke to the idea that there were other things that she was likely overlooking, and a slight panic crawled up her spine.
"No, I guess I didn't," said Toni.
"Would it... I would like if I could paint them if that would be okay with you?"
Amy was so meek in this request that it seemed that years sloughed off her demeanor, their relationship.
"You want to paint my nails?"
"Yeah, like we used to. Remember?"
Toni remembered, as the older sister and thus the one who better recalled Amy's girlhood. Their father always bought them polishes at the mall, against their mother's wishes, tired of having to scrub it from the bedposts and walls. He did it, Toni realized in retrospect, because he felt the weight of guilt for cheating on their mother and, which was the bigger sin in Toni's eyes, telling these women that his children had died in an auto wreck. There was not an appropriate amount of candy apple red and electric blue that balanced out being turned into a plot contrivance, of being written out of the show.
She and Amy had started messy in their nail painting, getting more polish on their skin than nails. Amy had always undertaken this strange softness as she focused on Toni's fingers, as though the world shrank to the edge of Toni's cuticles. Toni's own paint jobs retained a messy look no matter the time she took on them -- though this was one of the few things about which Amy never complained -- but Amy grew to paint her sister's nails as though it was a sacred act that demanded perfection.
Then she stopped. Toni figured it had to be when Amy was twelve or thirteen, but it was not as though either one of them knew it to mark the date. They grew up enough that they would not sneak out of their bedrooms at night to plait hair and paint nails. Toni wondered if Amy had gone on to paint her friends' nails with this devotion.
Amy nodded to the living room, where she had already set up all that she would need, the polish and topcoat, the tiny scissors and file. Now that Toni has assented -- how could she do otherwise? -- Amy was suffused with a quiet excitement that Toni found disarming and mildly uncomfortable. This whole weekend, Amy had seemed so tightly wound that Toni imagined that jostling her at the wrong moment would make a spring fly out. Now, Amy was, if anything, happy.
Toni seated herself in the chair before the table. There was a moment of Amy's characteristic prickliness when her sister could not intuit exactly where Amy wanted her hands. It could not last as she gave herself over to the consuming serenity of the work.
Toni heard people outside, gathering for the picnic, murmuring to one another what needed to be done to bring the wedding off and figure out how to restore the power. None of them came into the living room, perhaps seeing that this was a holy act that should not be disturbed. Toni was grateful. She did not know when she and Amy would have a moment like this again.
Toni would remember now the last time her sister had painted her nails.
They were an island of peace in the chaos of the wedding. Amy applied the final touches to her now lapis fingernails.
"There," she said, "now you have something blue."
Amy stood up, gave her sister a small smile, and left her to dry in the unlit house.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.