Kelly Link - Get in Trouble - Stories

Thanh wants to tell Harper about the text. Maybe it would make him laugh. He doesn’t. It wouldn’t.

Eventually the fight is about the wedding. Should they cancel? Thanh thinks if they leave town now, something terrible will happen. The baby will come. He can’t say this to Harper. That would also be bad for the baby.

At this stage of a pregnancy a fetus’s lungs are insufficiently developed. Should Naomi go into labor now, the baby will live or the baby will die. It’s fifty-fifty. If the baby lives, the chances are one in five it will be severely disabled. Harper wants to go to the wedding. He won’t know anyone there except for Thanh and Fleur, but Harper likes meeting people, especially when he knows he never has to see them again. Harper likes new people. Harper and Thanh have been together now for sixteen years. Married for six. Anyway, when will there be another chance for adventure? The next stage of their life is slouching over the horizon.

Naomi says go. The tickets are nonrefundable. Everything will be fine. Thanh’s mother, Han, agrees to fly in from Chicago and stay with Naomi. Han and Naomi have become friends on Facebook. Han doesn’t understand anything about Thanh’s life, he has understood this for a long time, but she loves him anyway. She loves Naomi, too, because Naomi is carrying her grandchild. Naomi’s own mother is not in the picture. Harper’s parents are both assholes.

They go to Fleur’s wedding.

Fleur was always in charge of parties. Always threw the best parties, the ones that people who have long since moved out to the wealthier suburbs — Newton, Sudbury, Lincoln — still talk about, the parties that took days in darkened rooms to recover from. Fleur was, in her twenties, thrifty, ruthless, psychologically astute. Able to wring maximum fun, maximum exhausting whimsy, out of all gatherings. And now Fleur has not only filthy improvisatory cunning, but money. Who is paying for all of this? Fleur’s fiancé David’s family owns the island. He does something that Fleur is vague about. Travels. There is family money. His family is in snacks. A van picks up Harper and Thanh, two other couples, and two women from Chula Vista. Friends of Fleur. Fleur moved out to Point Loma a few years ago, which is where she met David doing whatever it is that he does. The women are Marianne and Laura. They say David is nice. Good with his hands. A little scary. They don’t really know him. They know Fleur from Bikram yoga. The air-conditioning in the van isn’t working. The wedding guests are taken in the van from the tiny regional airport where everyone flew in on tiny, toy-sized prop planes to an equally tiny pier. Everything snack-sized. The boat that goes over to Bad Claw Island has a glass bottom. How cute, Marianne says. The pilot, a black guy with the greenest eyes Thanh has ever seen, is gay. Indisputably gay. Down here the Atlantic is softer. It seems bigger. But maybe that’s because everything else is so much smaller. There’s a cooler on the boat; in it, individual see-through thermoses filled with something citrusy and alcoholic. In a basket, prepackaged snacks, crackers, and cookies. Fleur spent her twenties as a bartender in various Boston bars. She and Thanh met at ManRay. ManRay has been closed for a long time now. Thousands of years.

Han has sent Thanh a text. Everything is fine. Okay? Fine! Great! She and Naomi are watching Bollywood musicals. Eating Belgian fries. Naomi wants to know all about Thanh and Harper when they were young and dumb. (Not that this is how Han puts it. Nevertheless.) Don’t tell her anything, Thanh texts back. I mean it.

Harper is in one of his golden moods. Rare these days. He looks a hundred years younger than this morning when they caught the cab. He solicits information from the two couples. Which side of the wedding party. Where they are coming from. What they do. Everyone here is a friend of Fleur’s, but no one has as long and distinguished a claim as Harper and Thanh. Harper, saying he has a bad back, lies down on the glass bottom of the boat. Everyone has to rearrange their feet. No one minds. He tells a story about the time Fleur, inebriated and in a rage, who knows what brought it on, kicked in the front of a jukebox at an Allston bar. The Silhouette. All of those early nineties alt-rock boys in their dirty black jeans. Legs like toothpicks, jeans so tight they could hardly bend their knees when they sat down. Thanh used to marvel at their barely-there asses. Allston rock butt. A U2 song is playing on the jukebox when Fleur kicks it in. Harper, nimble spinner of the spectacular untruth, improvises a story. Bono once jerked off on her little sister when she fell asleep backstage after a concert. After that, Fleur gets free drinks whenever they go to The Silhouette. She even works there for a few months.

Is this the kind of story you are supposed to tell to strangers on your way to a wedding? Better, Thanh supposes, than the one about the albatross. The best part of Harper’s story is that Harper wasn’t even at The Silhouette that night. It was just Thanh and Fleur, on some night. Thanh was the one who made up the story about Bono. But there is no story that Harper does not further embellish, does not re-embroider. Thanh wonders if that story still circulates. Did anyone ever tell it back to Bono himself? Maybe Thanh should Google it. You can see the lumpy profile of what must be Bad Claw Island, maybe half a mile away. Tide’s out, the pilot says over the intercom. You can wade over from here. Water’s maybe three feet deep. You can swim! If you want. Harper jumps up. His back good as new. Absolutely, he says. Who’s in? Harper takes off his shoes, jeans, shirt. There’s that fat, hairy belly. Leaves his briefs on. He goes over the side and down the ladder. Two men and a woman named Natasha join him. All in their underwear.

Thanh stays put beneath the white canopy of the boat. Little waves slap pleasantly at the hull. There’s the most pleasant little breeze. He likes the way the water looks through the glass bottom. Like a magic trick. Why spoil it? Besides, he forgot to collect the laundry out of the dryer before they caught the plane. He isn’t wearing any underwear. The boat gets to shore first, but before Thanh steps off onto the dock, Harper swims up under the glass. Presses his lips up. Then, suggestively, his wriggling hips. Here I am, Thanh, having sex with a boat. See, Thanh? I told you we would have a good time.

Fleur is on the dock, kissing her friends. The boat pilot, too. Why not? He’s very good-looking. Fleur’s wearing a white bikini and a top hat. Her hair is longer than Thanh has ever seen it. She’s let it go back to its natural color. I’m the wedding party, she says, still giving those loving kisses. Exuberant kisses! She smells like frangipani and bourbon. Representing both the bride, me, and my groom, David. Because he’s not here yet. He’s delayed. Look at you, Thanh! Both of you! Has it really been two years? My God. Come up to the lodge. Everyone else has to sleep in a yurt on the beach. Well, everyone except the old people, who are staying over on the mainland. But you and Harper get a bed. A bed in an actual room and there’s even a door. Remember the apartment in Somerville? The girl who came over from Ireland to visit her girlfriend and got dumped before she even landed? We put a mattress behind the sofa and she stayed all summer? Have you seen Barb? Is she still in Prague? Do you know if you’re having a boy or a girl yet? What’s this woman like, the surrogate?

She never stops talking. Kissing, talking, Fleur likes to do both. The other wedding guests are sent off to claim their yurts. Fleur’s sister Lenny takes them away. Thanh has never liked Lenny. He hasn’t seen her in over a decade, but he doesn’t like her any better now. Harper puts his pants back on and they follow Fleur up the beach. Did you ever sleep with her? Harper said once to Thanh. Of course not, Thanh said.