Paper Bag Dress

The first time they bumped into each other, she was holding a bouquet, and he was giving a bride away. She could feel him looking at her, and she blushed the same color as her peonies and tried not to smile more than the beatific Mona Lisa half-grin she’d had plastered on her face all morning. She'd smiled so much her face hurt. She couldn’t wait to get back to the hotel room and drink alcohol from tiny bottles and frown at her reflection in the mirror in order to flex the overworked muscles in the opposite direction.

It’s never appropriate to flirt with the father of the bride—everyone knows that. And it isn’t appropriate to flirt with the uncle of the bride, and it isn’t appropriate to flirt with any relation of the bride. Except he wasn’t a relation of the bride. He was a stand-in. That’s what she’d heard anyway. The bride was estranged from her family, and so this man was a coworker or a boss or a mechanic, something like that.

Why was Wilma even here? She hardly knew the bride. But she did know the groom, and not in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink way, but kind of in a nudge-wink-nudge-wink kind of a way.

The two had almost hooked up back in college, at a party in which people had come dressed as their favorite cartoon characters and she’d been Wilma Flintstone (because of her name) and he’d been Barney Rubble (because of his) and something about the taboo quality of sleeping with her cartoon husband’s best friend had appealed to her, but it never happened. They’d been too blotto that night, and then the window had closed.

Not that there hadn’t been a little bit of chemistry. But she’d never been great with Bunsen burners.