The Most Fun We Ever Had - Claire Lombardo Page 0,1

him beneath the purple flower bushes and running her hand through his bristly fur, the part of his butt that looked like it had been permed.

* * *

—

Liza felt a little bad, seeing her younger sister finding solace in the dog while she herself was finding solace inside a stranger’s mouth, but the groomsman emanated a smoky vapor of whiskey and arugula and he was doing something with his fingers to the inside of her thigh that made her turn her head away, deciding that Grace could fend for herself, that it wasn’t possible to learn that skill too early.

“Tell me about you,” the groomsman said, his knuckles grazing the lacy insignificance of the thong she’d worn in the hopes of exactly such an occasion.

“What do you want to know?” she asked. It came out sounding kind of hostile. She’d not quite mastered being flirtatious.

“There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?”

“It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.”

He smiled, confused, and she leaned forward boldly and kissed him.

* * *

—

Violet had never been quite so drunk, sitting slumped, alone, at one of the tables, from which she supposed she’d driven the other guests. The previous night came to her in fizzy episodic sunbursts: the bar that used to be a bowling alley; her blue-eyed companion with his double-jointed elbows, the athletic clasp of his thighs, the back of his mother’s station wagon; how she’d made sounds she did not recognize at first as coming from her own throat, porn star sounds, primal groans. How he came first—she’d later felt him dripping out of her, when they climbed back into the front seat—and then made her, with a deft attention to detail, come as well, for the first time in her life. And how she’d made him drop her a block away from her parents’ house lest Wendy be still awake.

She watched Wendy, wearing sweetheart-neck Gucci at her backyard wedding to an old-money academic, being spun in circles by her new husband to “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Her sister had, for the first time, surpassed her, success-wise. She was blithe and beautiful and twirling in circles while Violet was drunk past the point of physical comfort, gnawing at a full loaf of catered focaccia, rubbing the oil on the underside of her skirt. But she felt herself smiling a little at Wendy, at oblivious Wendy getting grass stains on her satin train. Imagined going over to her sister and whispering in her ear, You’d die if you knew where I was last night.

* * *

—

Wendy watched as Miles, throwing an apologetic smile at her over his shoulder, was pulled away from her by his toddler cousin, their ringbearer, who had solicited his accompaniment to the cake table.

“There’s some good daddy training happening over there,” someone said, taking her by the elbow. It was a guest from Miles’s side, possibly someone’s real estate broker, a silicone goblin of a woman. The people on the lawn at present were probably collectively worth more than the GDP of a midsize country. “It’s good you’re so young. Plenty of time to flesh out the family tree.”

It seemed a crass thing to say for a variety of reasons, so Wendy responded in kind: “Who says I want to split up my share among a bunch of kids?”

The woman looked horrified, but Wendy and Miles lived for these jokes, were allowed to make these jokes because neither of them gave a fuck if people thought Wendy was a gold digger; all that mattered was what they knew to be true, which was that she’d never loved another person as fiercely as she did Miles Eisenberg, and he, by some grand cosmic miracle, loved her back. She was an Eisenberg now. In the top thirty, at least, of the wealthiest families in Chicago. She could fuck with whomever she wanted.

“It’s my plan to outlive everyone and spend my days reveling in a disgusting level of opulence,” she said. And she rose from her seat and went to straighten her new husband’s tie.

* * *

—

The trees, David noted, were burgeoning that day, big prodigious leaves making dancing shadows across the grass, which they’d tried to keep the dog off of for the sake of aesthetic preservation, David and Marilyn rising early in the mornings and pulling on raincoats over their pajamas to walk him instead of just opening the back door like they normally did. He watched as the rented tables