table fourteen

They put me at table fourteen, which is the table they make out of the people who don’t go anywhere else. I knew this the way you know weather. Table one is the wedding party. Tables two through five are family and the friends who are basically family. Somewhere around nine it starts getting speculative, and by fourteen you are looking at a centerpiece slightly shorter than the others and a collection of human beings assembled by process of elimination.

I was there because Priya, the bride, and I share a dentist and a running route and eleven years of saying we should really hang out. Plus-one had food poisoning. So: fourteen.

The man to my left introduced himself as the groom’s boss’s husband. “Not the groom’s boss,” he clarified. “The husband of. I’ve met Daniel twice. I’m here for the open bar and to support my spouse, who is at table three and having a much better night than me.” He said this with such contentment that I laughed, and the woman across from us leaned in and said, “Oh good, we have a laugher,” like she’d been waiting to find out whether the table would take.

The woman was somebody’s great-aunt. Not our somebody — she wasn’t sure whose. “I got a very nice invitation,” she said, “and I like a party, and nobody’s checked, so.” She was eighty-one. She had brought her own hot sauce in her purse, a little bottle, and she put it on the salmon without comment and then, seeing me watch, tipped a few drops onto my plate too, the way you’d share a secret.

There was a boy of maybe nine at the end, dressed like a small ambassador, who had been deposited with us because the kids’ table had descended into a state his mother described, passing by, as “Lord of the Flies.” He was deeply serious. He informed us that the average wedding cake weighs fifteen pounds and that this one was clearly heavier, and we accepted this as fact and spent a genuinely good six minutes estimating the cake by eye. The great-aunt said twenty-two pounds. The boss’s husband said “structurally, no more than eighteen, or it’d sag.” The boy wrote our guesses on his napkin in the pen he had, of course, brought.

Nobody at table fourteen had a stake in anything. That was the thing. At table three my running-buddy bride was crying in the good way and being toasted and holding the specific weight of the night, and it was hers to hold and it looked heavy and beautiful. At fourteen we had nothing to hold. We could not be disappointed. We had shown up to the edge of someone else’s enormous day and been handed salmon and each other, and the freedom of it was total.

When the band started, the great-aunt stood up first. She held out her hand to the boy, who looked to his absent mother and, finding no ruling, decided in favor. They danced badly and with great ceremony. The boss’s husband and I watched, and he told me about the first time he met his spouse, which was at a wedding, at a table like this one, and I said that seemed like tempting fate, and he said, “No, this is exactly where you’d want it to happen. Look at us. Nobody’s performing. You can’t fall in love at table three. Everyone’s too important.”

I have thought about that a lot since. He was buying the next round when he said it, so I don’t know how much stock to put in it. But he wasn’t wrong that we were the loosest people in the room. The cake, when it came, was cut and weighed by nobody, and we never learned who won, and the boy folded up the napkin with our guesses on it and put it in his jacket pocket like a man filing something important, and maybe that was the closest a night like that comes to a record: four strangers’ bad guesses about the weight of a cake, kept by a serious child, at the table they make out of whoever’s left.

I gave the great-aunt my number at the end. She has not called. I hope she’s at a party.