The Best Man Takes the Bride

The Best Man Takes the Bride

Tampa Bay, Florida, January 1975

 

Truth rarely came wrapped in kindness. The cold fact was, Clair Weliver hated Harold Stiner so much that the foul flavor ruined her supper. An oily residue on the back of her tongue, sour and astringent as aftershave drunk straight from the bottle, threatened to release the bile in her stomach.

 

When she kept her mouth shut throughout the rehearsal dinner, it was only because of Jason Paul. The love of her life, the tall drink of fiancé, deserved a clean shot at happiness. Not the kind you took with a lemon wedge and regretted forever.

 

Scrutinizing Harold all night, the childish way he tucked his napkin into his collar, a bib to protect a shirt he hadn’t even pressed. The way he bullied his way into every conversation. The way he bent the ear of Jason’s two younger brothers, both in Army greens. The siblings were desperate for a real man to look up to. And Harold told them cop stories as if the rest of the world owed him an apology for existing.

 

Gripping the table, Harold laughed the loudest at his own jokes and showed too many teeth. A crocodile’s maw was less of a threat than Harold’s smirk when you raked his eyes over Clair.

 

A smaller irritation, Harold wore cologne you could smell from two tables over. Which, in the shadowed light of the Waterside Steak House, was an act of violence all its own. Something unspoken hovered between Jason and Harold’s eyes. Every time Harold gripped Jason’s neck, all times he refilled his glass, there was a danger only two men understood.

 

And Harold was ready, willing, and able to either baptize him in bourbon or throttle him if he didn’t shape up and play the best-friend game properly.

 

He congratulated himself while nibbling the prime rib. Picking his teeth with the little plastic swords from the cocktail olives, and calling the waitress “hon” so often that Clair counted the seconds between the rounds of honeying.

 

Regret settled like dust in her chest, for she had dated Harold once. The year Lyndon Johnson bombed North Vietnam, people started naming their kids Moon, Flower, Woodstock, Indigo, or Meadow. As a junior classmate, he drove her out to the causeway and put his hand up her skirt.

 

The memory hit with the force of a punch to the ribs; his breath reeked of beer and Pall Malls. The way his fingers worked her thighs, as if he kneaded bread dough. The way he talked about other girls while unbuttoning her blouse. The bastard needed her to understand that he took what he wanted. Take it from anyone, anytime, anyway.

 

With dread crawling up her spine, Clair said no.

 

Consumed by anger, Harold said nothing. Grinning, he pressed harder. But she was lucky only because his zipper jammed. When she laughed, it made him so furious that Harold dropped her off at her home and didn’t talk to her for the rest of the year.

 

Other girls weren’t so lucky.

 

By senior year, rumors swirled about what Harold had done to the sophomore with braces, or the blonde from debate, or the girl nobody planned to talk about after she transferred out mid-semester.

 

No one went to the police. In 1964, that wasn’t how things worked. If a girl said she was raped, the gym teachers, the principal, and even her parents peered at her as if she’d forged a note and skipped detention.

 

The boys on the football team bought Harold drinks and slapped him on the back. The girls protected their drinks and kept their backs to the wall. And now, ten years later, Harold was a cop, with a badge and a loaded service revolver. From the looks of it, the same hard-wired need to make other people smaller.

 

Clair ate nothing but her salad and half a breadstick, even though Jason’s mom made a whole show of ordering the Chateaubriand “for two, really, but we’ll make it stretch, ha ha,” and Harold piled her plate with beef slices he carved himself with the steakhouse’s signature serrated blade.

 

The men finished two pitchers of martinis and a bottle of red wine. She drank club soda, kept her hands in her lap, and shot daggers at Harold when she thought no one would notice.

 

He noticed. He always noticed.

 

“You’re tense,” he said after dessert, hovering over her like a storm cloud with hair. “You nervous, or is it the wedding nerves talking?”

 

“I’m fine,” she said, folding her napkin with surgical precision.

 

“Sure,” Harold said, and dropped a heavy palm on Jason’s shoulder. “Our girl’s excited to pop out a passel of kids, right, Jason? She’ll loosen up tomorrow after the first dance.” He winked at her. “She’s always wanted at least five, let’s see, she gets them,” he said in Jason’s ear, not so softly that Clair didn’t hear.

 

Jason, still so new to the world of post-grad adulthood that he ironed his own shirts and never missed Sunday service, nodded, dopey and pink-cheeked and as oblivious as a golden retriever to the undercurrents boiling below the tablecloth.