EXCERPT: "A Hell of a Wedding" by David 29 Sunset
Tara met Jason at a coffee shop. She remembered it was a Saturday afternoon, and she had been at the same table for three hours, grading eleven-year-olds’ essays. The school year was almost finished, and she felt some of the kids had already left her behind the same way her previous year’s class had moved on. For many of them, this was the last time they would have a child’s wonder for the world. As soon as they entered middle school, everything started prompting them to become savvy and knowing. Teenagers asked fewer questions because not knowing something was vulnerability, and weakness could not be tolerated.
She noticed the man sitting at a nearby table who kept glancing at her. He wore jeans with brown flip-flops and a heathered gray Avett Brothers t-shirt. He tried to hide his peeking by letting his long, scraggly brown hair drape over his face as he pretended to look at his phone. The fourth or fifth time he looked at her, Tara pursed her lips, fixed her eyes on him, and gave her best teacher stare, daring him to try again. When, indeed, he looked up and met her eyes with his, he smirked, stood up, and approached.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hello,” Tara replied.
“My name’s Jason. Are you busy? Do you mind if I sit here?”
“Seat’s empty. You can sit if you like.”
Jason sat in the chair across from Tara and leaned back, sipping from a coffee cup. She took an extra few minutes to finish grading the final essay, straightened her stack of papers, placed them in a file folder, and packed them in her bag. She folded her hands together, placed them on the table, and looked at Jason.
“Can I help you?” she said.
“Just wondering if you wanted to talk.”
“Sure.”
“So you’re a teacher.”
“Yes.”
“What grade?”
“Fifth.”
“You like it?”
“Yes.”
“Summer break is coming up.”
“It is.”
“Got any plans?”
“I’m looking forward to a lot of nothing. But I’ll also spend some time with my dad. And there are a couple hikes I’d like to do.”
“Hiking, huh? I’m more of a fishing guy, myself, but any time out in the woods is good by me. You ever been to the trails out at the Whitewater Center?”
“Not yet, but I’m planning to go.”
“It’s great. You’ve gotta watch out for the mountain bikers, but totally worth it. And just a short drive from here. Is hiking your main thing? Where are your favorite places to go?”
Though Tara kept wondering when she might get up to leave, she stayed and talked. He said that he was also an only child, was raised in Matthews, that he worked in marketing for a financial services company, and he lived in a townhouse a short walk away. They talked until the sun went down and the coffee shop mostly cleared out, at which point the conversation sputtered and stalled.
“I’d better get going,” Tara said.
“Ah, okay, I get it,” Jason said. “But this was good, right?”
“Yeah, it was all right.”
“Maybe we could meet up again?”
Tara considered. He hadn’t shaved that day. But he’d asked her questions. Summer was coming, so she’d have some time.
She took out her phone and said, “My name is Tara. What’s your number?”
They met again. The school year ended, and they met again, and again. She met his friends, most of them men with varying lengths of blonde or brown hair and a penchant for calling her “dude”. They went to brewpubs with freshly-stained patios and ordered burgers and Miller Lites. She stayed the night at his townhouse and awoke to the sound of him downstairs in the living room, noodling on electric bass by himself.
For his twenty-eighth birthday weekend, they went out bar-hopping that Friday night in a group that included Tara, a bunch of his friends, and their girlfriends. The men drank beer and competed to tell the most outlandish stories from college while the women smiled and struggled to hear anything over the music and the hollering. Early the next morning Jason and a few of his buddies staggered into their trucks and drove off on a camping trip. Monday evening, she still hadn’t heard from him, so she called, and he picked up with a groggy voice.
“Hey,” he grunted.
“I’m sorry. Were you asleep?”
“Yeah. Got back a couple hours ago.”
“Okay. I wanted to make sure you’re all right.”
“Yeah, I’m great. It was a good weekend. You good?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Good to hear.”
“Okay.”
“Night.”
“Good night.”
After the new school year started, he asked her to move in with him, but she resisted. Her apartment was smaller than the townhouse, but she knew that he liked having his friends visit often. They would come straight after work, bring beers, watch sports, and talk into the night. The first couple times they came over while she was there, she sat on the couch with them, nursed a beer, tried to follow along as they watched replays of men punching each other in a cage, and thought about the grading she wasn’t doing. After that, if his friends came over while she was there, she greeted them, then waited for an opportune moment to retire upstairs to the bedroom, where she attempted to read essays despite their muffled shouts from below.
Jason wasn’t upset so much as perplexed that she wouldn’t move in with him. He told her she was wasting thousands of dollars. He said they could use her plates and silverware, if she wanted. They could even get rid of his full-size platform bed and choose a new queen-size bed together. Tara told him she liked having her own apartment and that it was good for him to have his own space to do as he pleased, also.
At Thanksgiving, she brought him to her father’s house in Kannapolis. Jason shook her father’s hand when he entered, put his napkin in his lap at dinner, and offered to help wash dishes. The only rough patch was when Jason wondered aloud about the scores of the football games, and Tara’s father drily answered that he didn’t have a television but Jason was free to check his phone. Jason frowned. Tara asked him to tell her father about the meat smoker he was thinking about buying, and the good feelings returned.
When the school year ended, Tara was exhausted. She’d grown weary of standing up in front of twenty-five students every day and performing for them, attempting to inspire them to love learning. No matter how much she tried to center the children, she remained the focus of the class’s attention. She looked forward to going home every day, and she didn’t miss the kids.
She’d always liked taking photographs and brought her camera with her on trips, even though she knew most people wouldn’t see much difference between the photos she took on her DSLR and ones she took on her phone. She appreciated that she had to construct the image on her camera, selecting a lens, shutter speed, and aperture. Later, on her computer, she would make tweaks to the better images. She still used her phone to take pictures, but she couldn’t shake a nagging discomfort with letting the phone make all those choices and adjustments for her.
The week after school ended, one of Jason’s friends asked if Tara would take pregnancy portraits of his girlfriend and him. The three of them went to a park with an arched stone bridge, and she took pictures of the couple holding hands, looking at the water, and lounging on grass. When she emailed the pictures the next day, the girlfriend immediately emailed back, thanking Tara profusely and telling her she loved all of them.
Word spread. The girlfriend had another pregnant friend. They knew someone who had just gotten engaged. Another person saw the photos on Instagram and asked if Tara could photograph her twin sons ahead of their fourth birthday. By the end of summer, Tara had invested in new lenses and informed the school district she would not return in the fall.
Jason had never shouted at her before, but he shouted about this. She told him when he was at her place one evening, after she’d already submitted her resignation. They had just finished dinner. He slammed his hand on the table, and the dishes rattled. He told her it was a terrible decision, that she’d thrown away a steady career with a pension at the end for a precarious freelance existence.
“Don’t you know this is how the middle class gets fucked?” he said. “We’ve all been sold a bunch of lies about achieving the American dream of independence when really it benefits the rich to have everyone work on their own. You had it made, as much as someone can have it made in an anti-union state, and you’re flushing it away.”
Had she created an invoice process? How many gigs did she have lined up? What was her business plan? Would she work on weekends now? Was she planning to move in with him?
Tara told him she would figure everything out, and that she intended to keep her apartment. He apologized for yelling, held her hands, and said he believed in her.
She set up a website and established her rates. Through word of mouth, she got steady work taking portraits of young, affluent, blonde and brunette women and their families in and around Charlotte. She came to understand what the women who formed her clientele wanted from the photographs: to be seen as happy, carefree, effortlessly stylish, in control.
She landed her first wedding that fall. A woman who had hired her to photograph her family asked if she could handle her mother’s wedding. It was small, with only about twenty people in attendance, and Tara charged the same hourly rate as she did for her portrait sessions. The wedding was in the morning, and the afternoon reception was in the bride’s home. Tara took pictures until the bride insisted she stop and eat something, already.
Jason didn’t complain about the changes in her schedule, that she was working on the weekends a lot. They still saw each other two or three times each week, usually at his townhouse, and they fell into a routine. They asked about the other’s day and decided what to eat. If his friends weren’t over, they decided what to watch on television, had sex in his bed, then went to sleep. She left early in the morning, before he left for work.
On a Saturday afternoon in April, Jason was a groomsman for a high school friend’s wedding. Tara was the photographer and, because Jason was in the wedding and he insisted, she agreed to do the work as their joint wedding gift.
The ceremony was on a plantation outside of Charlotte, with a mansion and extensive grounds. Tara thought Jason looked especially handsome in his suit, so, for the first time, she handed the camera to another guest and asked them to take photos of the two of them together in the dappled afternoon light underneath a massive oak tree in front of the mansion’s worn wooden door. She couldn’t see the pictures through the viewfinder, but as she looked up at Jason, touched his face, and smiled, she imagined framing a print that captured that moment and hanging it in her apartment.
The next afternoon. Tara was at home, editing photos, when her phone buzzed. It was a text from Jason which said: “You around?”
She saw it, but continued editing and made a mental note to respond when she was done with the set. A few minutes later, her phone buzzed again, and she saw he’d left a longer message. When she finished editing the pictures, about a half-hour later, she picked up her phone.
His text said: “I know you’re probably working right now, but this can’t wait. You’re great, and I appreciate you, and how you get along with all my friends, but I need to take a break from us. Or just move on.”
Tara read the text five or six times, to be sure she understood it, then called her father. She didn’t remember much of the conversation, but did recall he wasn’t surprised, and that he asked if she wanted him to go to Jason’s place to pick up any of her things that might be there. That wasn’t necessary, since she hadn’t even left a toothbrush at Jason’s home — she always brought a toiletries kit with her whenever she stayed over — but she thanked her father for the offer.
She must have completed editing the photos, but she couldn’t be sure because the next three weeks were a haze of work and sleep and food and work and sleep and food. She left the apartment to go on photo shoots and to get groceries. Once, as she walked through the frozen dinners aisle at Harris Teeter, she saw a bag of tortellini, remembered how Jason would cook a full bag of the pasta, pour the tortellini into a mixing bowl, dump an entire jar of tomato sauce over it, and eat directly from the bowl, leaving the empty bag and pot and colander and jar on the kitchen counter, and she burst into tears.
She texted a couple of his friends’ girlfriends — the ones she thought she’d gotten along with best — but they didn’t respond. The days flowed by, and she could remember what happened during that time no better than she could remember a given week of kindergarten. Her brain retained no memory of it.
What remained, moving forward, was a quiet low-frequency hum that undergirded everything she did. For brief, blissful, periods she was able to forget it was there, but inevitably she noticed it again. The hum was both a sound and a vision, a wave and a particle, solid and liquid and gas. At first, she thought it was Jason haunting her on the edge of consciousness, but eventually she recognized it wasn’t precisely him, but a feeling he’d implanted. The hum droned on repeat that love is hard to find, that she had never felt it, and it was possible she would never earn it.
* * *
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