The Table You Built

The table is forty feet long, and you know every inch of it.

Black walnut, cut from a single storm-felled tree on a farm outside Weaverville, dried for two years in the loft of your shop. You built it in six sections so it would fit through the doors of the Laurel Crest Inn's great room, and you joined them tonight with brass butterfly keys while the caterers stood around pretending not to watch. Two hundred people are eating off it now. Short rib. Truffle potatoes. Champagne in glasses so thin you're afraid to hold yours too hard.

"It's a showpiece," someone says down the row. "Who did they get?"

"Him," the woman beside her says, nodding at you. "The groom."

"Oh. The carpenter."

You let it go. You've been letting things go at Ashbury events for three years.

Through the tall windows the Blue Ridge is going purple in the dusk, ridge after ridge folding away toward Tennessee. Strings of lights hang from the old chestnut beams. The room smells like beeswax candles and money. Your side of the guest list is three tables near the kitchen door: Thorsten, your foreman, in a tie he keeps tugging; a few clients who became friends; old Mordecai Cutright, who taught you everything you know about joinery and who is currently glaring at a shrimp fork like it insulted him.

The Ashbury side is everyone else.

"Smile, Ethan," Thorsten mutters, leaning over. "You look like you're waiting for a jury."

"I'm smiling."

"You're doing the thing with your jaw."

Maybe. Celandine has been gone for twenty minutes. She left right after the toasts, kissed your cheek, and said, Don't move, I have a surprise. She smelled like gardenias and was wearing white silk that probably cost what you charge for a dining set. She is, without question, the most beautiful woman in this room, and for three years you've been trying to figure out why she chose you.

At the head of the table her father is holding court. Alton Ashbury owns this inn and four others like it, and he has the kind of voice that was built for telling people where to stand. He has never once called you by your name. Tonight, in his toast, he called you "the young man who builds our furniture," and the room laughed warmly, and Celandine squeezed your hand under the table.

Beside him, her mother Heloise eats very small bites and says nothing.

And across from you, three seats down, is Fiorella.

The younger sister. She did the flowers tonight, of course. Foxglove & Fern is the studio every mountain bride in Asheville wants, and the centerpieces running down your table are wild things: ranunculus and sweet pea and branches of flowering dogwood she must have climbed a tree to get. Her auburn hair is pinned up, badly, with something that might be a chopstick. Freckles across her nose. Green-gold eyes that catch the candlelight. Half the groomsmen have been sneaking looks at her since the cocktail hour, and she hasn't noticed a single one, because she's arguing with a cousin about whether peonies are overrated.

She catches you watching and rolls her eyes toward her father, mid-speech, as if to say can you believe this man.

You almost laugh. She's always been like that. At every Sunday dinner, every Christmas, every time Alton asked you what you "plan to do for real money," Fiorella was the one who said, "He's booked out for eight months, Dad, what are you booked out for?"

The lights dim.

A screen hums down from the ceiling at the far end of the room. Music starts, something soft with piano, and the crowd murmurs and turns. You turn too. Your chest goes warm and stupid. She made a slideshow. Of course she did. Celandine never does anything halfway.

She walks onto the little stage by the fireplace with a microphone in her hand, and the room goes quiet for her the way rooms always do.

"Thank you all for coming," she says. Her voice is low and clear. "Most of you know I'm not sentimental."

Laughter.

"So I want to be honest with the people who matter most to me."

Thorsten's hand stops halfway to his glass.

Something in her face is wrong. You've seen that smile before, but never pointed at you. It's the one she uses on investors. On vendors who missed a deadline. On waiters.

"I'm ending my engagement," Celandine says.

The piano keeps playing. Nobody else moves.

"I found out last week that the man I was going to marry has been seeing someone else." She lifts a hand toward the screen. "I didn't want to believe it either."

The slideshow changes. It isn't photos of the two of you anymore. It's text messages. A green and gray thread, enlarged so everyone can read it, sent from your number to a contact saved as J. Can't stop thinking about last night. She'll never find out. She's too busy planning the party.

You have never seen those words in your life.

"That's not—" you start, and your voice is nothing in this room.

The next slide. A blurry photo of a man who might be you, from behind, with his arm around a woman in a parking lot.

The room comes alive at once. Gasps. A woman says oh my God with real pleasure. Someone near the bar actually laughs, and then someone else does, and it spreads the way laughter does when people are relieved it isn't happening to them.

"Celandine." You're on your feet. "Those aren't mine. Look at me. Those are not mine."

She looks at you. For one second something flickers in her ice-blue eyes, and then it's gone.

"I'm giving the ring back tonight," she says into the microphone, "because I'd rather be embarrassed than be a fool." She slides the ring off and sets it on the mantel. Applause starts somewhere. Actual applause.

Alton Ashbury stands up at the head of your table. Your table.

"Well," he says, loud enough for the room. "I can't say I'm surprised. I told her a hobbyist with a garage was never going to be enough for this family." He raises his glass. "To my daughter's good sense."

People drink.

You stand there with two hundred faces turned toward you and your own walnut under your hands. Thorsten is saying something. Mordecai is getting up, slowly, his chair scraping. Your face is burning, and there's a high ringing in your ears, and you think, very clearly, I sanded this table for nine days so they could laugh at me across it.

Then another chair scrapes back.

Fiorella Ashbury stands up at the family end of the table. She sets her champagne glass down so carefully it doesn't make a sound. She doesn't look at her father. She doesn't look at the screen.

She looks at you.

"Ethan," she says, in a voice that carries all the way to the kitchen doors. "Get your keys."

Then she turns to the room, to her sister on the stage, to every laughing face, and says:

"I'm leaving with him."