The group turned back to Lindsay, as if they’d forgotten she was there.
“Those big windows? It’s like a chapel.” She let a lace sleeve slide between her fingers and flutter back down to the rack. “This is where they used to do the funerals, with the bodies in the casket.”
Blanche made a face. Brianne, the maid of honor, asked what the hell that had to do with anything.
“It’s just interesting, you know?” Lindsay drained her flute of lower-middle-tier cava, looked around for a place to stash the glass, and settled for holding it at her hip with her thumb through the belt loop of her jeans, a bridal party gunslinger. “This used to be a place where people’s lives, like, really, finally ended, and now it’s a place that helps people’s new lives to really begin.”
“Don’t be morbid,” said Brianne.
“I don’t think it’s morbid,” said Jen, still wearing the electric blue dress with the poofy collar that everyone else had shot down, like it was armor. “I think it’s nice.”
Blanche threaded her way back to her cousin through a bridal party that resembled nothing so much as a festive spill of Jolly Ranchers.
“I’m not starting a new life, Lindsay,” she said, slowly and with a smile, as if she were explaining calculus to a salamander out of some sort of public-service obligation. “I’m just getting married.”
“Same thing. When the married you is born, the single you dies.” Lindsay held out her empty glass, forcing Blanche to take it; in the bride’s hand, the flute magically summoned a silent woman with a tight up-do and a tighter smile to fill it.
“You’re high.”
“But what if she’s right?” said Carol, who, if we’re sticking with the bridesmaids-in-dresses-as-Jolly-Rancher-flavors motif, would qualify as cherry. “What if every major life change is a death and a rebirth?”
“Can we just,” said Brianne, who was clearly about one more deviation from the plan away from apoplexy, “can we just decide on a dress and make our brunch reservation?”
“It’s like cats,” said Kate, who up until then had been quietly trying to maintain after the shots of limoncello at the condo and the spliff in the limo. “We’re so envious of cats because they’ve got nine lives, because we think of them as nine actual lives, and we don’t have that. But what if that just means nine major life changes, like graduation or marriage or whatever?”
The woman with the tight up-do abruptly stopped offering free booze, and started being less immediately available.
“So are we planning to make this Blanche’s new life, or Blanche’s, like, death and rebirth?” asked Lindsay.
“We are planning,” replied Brianne, “to make this Blanche’s third-best day of her life, by taking her to brunch!”
And so they stepped out into the brilliant Saint Petersburg sun.
“For what it’s worth, Blanche,” said Lindsay, “I hope this is the last new life you have to have.”
“Blanche?” The filthy guy was suddenly crowding her; none of them could’ve said where he came from. “You don’t look like a Blanche.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Blanche, giggling, as her friends began to pile into the limo.
“You should change it,” said the filthy guy, smiling. “Something prettier, like you.”
“No thanks,” said Blanche, catching her cousin’s eye. “I don’t want to waste one of my lives.”
This article appears in Apr 20-27, 2017.