The Might Have Been by Joe Schuster

right, calculating. “You were alive by then. I’m certain of it.”
    “I’m twenty-six,” he said, for some reason shaving a year off his own age.
    “Twenty-six,” she said, laughing. “I’m still not trading you my secrets. Okay, Mr. Twenty-six. What’s your story?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. I play ball. I’ve always played ball. That’s it. Not much of a story.” He picked up a roll and broke it in two, buttering half and laying the other half on the bread plate between them and then took it back and put it on his own plate, aware of his gaffe: they were strangers. She wouldn’t want to eat half a roll he’d touched. “Were you part of that wedding I saw earlier?” he asked her.
    “My baby sister’s,” she said, and then brightened. “She’s twenty-five. Younger than you, so there you go. That answers one of your questions.”
    “Questions?”
    “ ‘Is she old enough to be my mother or just an older sister?’ ”
    “My mother is—”
    “Oh, God, here we go.”
    “She’s fifty-nine.” Or had she turned sixty by then?
    “That’s a relief. I’m nowhere near fifty-nine.”
    She had me late
, he thought, but did not say. His mother was thirty-two when he was born, a Catholic woman who by then despaired of ever having children, until he came along: her one and only miracle.
    “My sister wanted to be married in Paris,” the woman said, cutting a bite from her sirloin and eating it.
    “Wow,” Edward Everett said. “Paris. Your family goes there quite a bit.”
    “You see, that’s just it. I went. She didn’t. The fortunes, well, have fallen since my father …” She finished her sentence by waving her fork in the air in a gesture that suggested she was dispersing smoke. “The Herron family, well, had its wings clipped. Financially. This was a compromise. Faux Paris. Here we are in the Salon de Jardin.” She gave a short laugh. “
Garden Room
,” she said in an exaggerated Midwestern accent, prolonging the “a” in “garden” and the “o” in “room.” She shook her head. “Pretentious—my sister has no idea what this is costing my mother. She took on a mortgage. I only hope to God she can pay it.”
    “Isn’t the wedding still going on?”
    “I’m confident it is.”
    “But you’re—”
    “Not there. Correct.”
    “Shouldn’t you be?”
    “Oh, it most definitely is unseemly that I’m not. The maid of honor has left the building. Not literally, of course. I’m still in the building, but … you know what I mean.”
    “Why?” he asked.
    “No. I haven’t had enough wine to tell you that particular secret. But maybe soon.” She winked at him, picked up the carafe and poured more wine into her glass, although it was only half-empty,filling the glass until the wine rose nearly to the brim. She started to set down the carafe but then, as an afterthought, filled his glass to the rim as well. “Cheers, Mr. Everett. Cheers.” She lifted her glass in a toast and when they touched glasses, wine lapped from hers onto the tablecloth. “I am not a good customer today, am I?”
    They fell into a silence then, eating their steaks and potatoes, while the restaurant around them began to fill up. Before they finished their meals, every table in the place had a party at it and there were patrons two and three deep at the entrance, some standing on tiptoe, craning their necks to gauge their prospects of being seated. The woman had ordered a second carafe of wine without asking if he wanted any and, between the two of them, the second was nearly empty: perhaps half a glass remained in it. Edward Everett had drunk three or four glasses, Estelle twice as much. Her eyes seemed unfocused and as she cut her meat, her movements lacked the precision they had when they began. He finished the wine in his glass and drained the carafe into it to prevent her from drinking any more. Not that another half glass would matter, he thought.
    “Shall we—more?” she