The Wedding Beat by Devan Sipher Page B

things were “Just Fine.”
    My phone beeped. It was Melinda.
    “I need to put you on hold,” I told my parents, interrupting them midsquabble. I clicked through to Melinda, fearing bad news and hoping she was merely delayed by the subway or Somalian pirates.
    “Where are you?” she asked.
    “Where are
you
?” I replied.
    “I’m sitting at a lovely table for two, minus my plus-one,” she said, before I realized I was hearing Mary J. Blige in stereo through my handset.
    “I am so there,” I said, bounding up the steps. I could have sworn I had suggested meeting in the bar, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but seeing her.
    The dining room was deck side. Rows of red-and-white-checker-clothed tables were arranged under a tent amid torchlike heater lamps wrapped in strings of colored Christmas lights.
    “I’m on the deck,” I said, still holding my phone to my ear.
    “I’mtoward the stern on the starboard side,” she said.
    “Is this a test?” I tried to remember if stern was front or back.
    “Yes,” she said with a laugh. “If you fail we’ll never meet.” I liked her challenging but flirtatious tone.
    “Aren’t you going to help me?” I asked as I strode between the tables, my head swiveling from side to side.
    “What kind of romantic hero seeks navigational assistance?”
    “The kind who might be doomed by a lack of nautical knowledge,” I said, psyched that she thought of me as a romantic hero.
    “Fear not, Braveheart, and veer not from your path, as I will be your beacon.”
    “Huh?”
    “I’m waving at you,” she said, and I could detect someone waving an arm. But in the dim light I couldn’t see her. “Do not tarry,” she said before hanging up.
Fat chance,
I thought, pocketing my phone and hurrying toward her.
    She stood to greet me. All six feet of her. She enveloped me as I hesitantly embraced her. We sat down and she smoothed a few strands of salt-and-pepper hair.
    “I have to confess, when I got your e-mail, I wasn’t sure who you were,” she said. “But now of course I remember we met at a party last summer in Southampton.”
    I didn’t know what to say. “I’ve never seen you before in my life” seemed inappropriate. But accurate.
    Or better yet: “Who are you and what have you done with Melinda?” Though, as Captain Al would undoubtedly have pointed out, she was in fact “a” Melinda. Just not the one I was looking for.
    Why did she respond to my e-mail if she didn’t know who I was?Why didn’t she realize she wasn’t the intended recipient? On the other hand, I was grateful she assumed I was a legitimate suitor rather than an incompetent stalker.
    Looking at her across the candlelit table, there was no reason she couldn’t be the object of a man’s obsession. Though I was guessing that she was in her mid-fifties, she was curvy in the right places with robust lips and doelike eyes.
    “You picked a great place,” she said, bobbing her head to the music. “I feel ten years younger just being among all these fabulous kids.”
    I instantly felt ten years older. I became uncomfortably aware that I was probably the second-oldest person on board.
    “My ex-husband would hate this place,” she said.
    I must have done something terrible in a previous life,
I thought as she chronicled twenty-five years of her former spouse’s foibles. “When I met him, he thought the Himalayas were a sexual position.” She also spoke of her two grandchildren—and shared pictures.
    All I wanted was to extricate myself as quickly as possible.
    My phone buzzed. It was my parents again, and I realized that I had inadvertently hung up on them. I was about to say I needed to take the call and use it as an excuse to escape, but I remembered that I had invited her to dinner. She hadn’t sought out the invitation. She hadn’t been the one prowling the Internet for a date. She simply consented to accompany me for a meal, and the least I could do was provide one.
    “Have you