Bee turned away from the dry-erase board in defeat.

“Fine,” she said to her mother, who had already returned the marker and about-faced, her sneakers squeaking on the hardwood floor as she made her way to the kitchen.

“Mom,” Bee called after her.

“What?”

“I’m hungry,” Bee said almost too quietly for her mother to hear.

“Have something light,” Donna responded sharply from the next room. “No sodium. That dress has absolutely no give, honey.”

Bee turned around and took one last look at the names at the top of the whiteboard, glad that she had Matt and would never again find herself without a date. She wondered, briefly and hopefully, if her singles would ever change their circumstances—if Hannah, Rob, Nancy, Vicki, and Joe would ever become easy-to-place spokes on a seating-chart wheel.

Bee scowled as her thoughts returned to swallowing another salt-free meal. She reached forward and firmly wiped the singles list clean.

Hannah

“Can I be honest with you?” Dawn asked Hannah in a loud whisper with a cigarette close to its ashy death in her right hand, a pack of bobby pins in her left.

Hannah knew by now that this wasn’t a real question.

After spending several consecutive days with Bee’s precocious matron of honor, Hannah had learned that Dawn began most of her sentences by asking theatrically, in an almost-shouted whisper, “Can I be honest with you?”

Rarely did the question correspond to the sentence that followed. Rarely did Dawn have any interest in honesty.

“It’s nothing bad,” Dawn continued, taking in Hannah’s cautious eyes and drawing out the word “bad” as if it had two syllables. “It’s just that I think you might want to consider putting on some more makeup before everything gets going today. All the other girls and I wear liner.” Dawn opened her eyes wide to illustrate. “I notice that you don’t wear any eyeliner. I don’t know if you can tell, but the rest of us—our eyes just pop. They pop in pictures. You have beautiful blue eyes, honey. I just don’t want you to get lost in the photos.”

Hannah’s nose was at least two feet from Dawn’s mouth, but she was still overcome by Dawn’s potent breath, which smelled of nicotine and Caesar salad. Hannah winced as Dawn released another puff, a nauseating blend of Parmesan and Parliaments.

Hannah wasn’t used to people smoking in her presence. Most of her friends had quit years ago when New York City approved its smoking ban. She knew a few summer smokers, friends who lit up on Brooklyn roof decks and patios, but it was too uncomfortable to smoke outside in the city after November.

Quality time with so many southerners during Bee’s wedding weekend reminded Hannah how lucky she was to live in a city that had chosen to ostracize smokers in just about every way possible. All of Bee’s soon-to-be in-laws from Raleigh and Durham were shameless chain smokers. Some of them even worked for Philip Morris.