The Best Man's Speech

Chapter 1: I. Draft One

Ladies and gentlemen, friends and family. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Ruben, and I have known the bride for exactly eleven years, which is how long it took her to forgive me for the incident with the borrowed car. Ruben Ferreira stared at the sentence on his laptop screen, hated it, and deleted it. It was Thursday night, and he was sitting on the narrow bed of a whitewashed guesthouse in the Franschhoek valley, with the window open to the smell of cut grass and warm vineyard dust. Beyond the glass, the mountains stood up black against a sky so thick with stars that it looked like spilled salt. Somewhere out in the dark, a night bird was repeating itself in two patient notes. In forty hours, his friend Naledi would marry the man she had been quietly adoring for six years, and Ruben, as best man, was expected to be funny, warm, and brief. He had been staring at the cursor for two hours. He was a paramedic. He was very good at kneeling in a crushed car at three in the morning and saying calm things to a stranger. He was not good at this. There was a knock on the doorframe, two sharp raps and a pause, and then a third, a little slower. A signal. An old, silly, private thing from a treehouse in Gqeberha, from a time when they were eight years old and thought the world could be run by secret codes. "It's open," said Ruben. His heart did something he chose, for the moment, to ignore. Thandi Nkosi came in with a duffel bag over one shoulder, a garment bag over the other, and her sandals in her hand. She had driven four hours from Johannesburg by way of a missed turn near Worcester, and she looked tired and rumpled and wonderful. Her braids were pinned up in a messy knot. There was a smear of red dust across one cheek. "Don't get up," she said. "I'm going to lie face-down on your bed now. Please do not speak to me for ten minutes." She did exactly that. She dropped her bags, crossed the room, and flopped across the foot of the mattress with a groan, narrowly missing his laptop. Ruben looked at the back of her head. He looked at the little curl of hair that always escaped at her left ear. And he thought, with the sudden, ordinary clarity of someone noticing the weather: I have known her for twenty-three years, and I have never once been unhappy to see her. "Is that the speech?" came a muffled voice from the pillow. "It's a speech." "Is it any good?" "It's terrible." "Read me the first line." He read it. Thandi lifted her face. She gave him a long, level, affectionate look. "Ruben," she said. "That's a joke about a car. Nobody at this wedding wants a joke about a car." "It's a good car joke." "It's the only car joke. Write something true." She put her head back down. "You always write the best things when you stop trying to be funny." He watched her breathe. He opened a new document, and typed, slowly: Draft Two.