Thirty-Six Questions, Badly

The board at gate B31 had been a calm, reassuring blue all afternoon. At 3:52 it turned red one line at a time, from the top, like a row of dominoes going over in slow motion. DELAYED. DELAYED. DELAYED. Then, with the air of a machine that had been waiting all week to say it: CANCELLED.

Mara stood very still and read the line for Portland twice, as if it might be persuaded to change its mind.

Outside the great windows of concourse B, Denver had disappeared. An hour ago there had been mountains out there. Now there was a white wall. The snow wasn't falling so much as travelling, sideways, at speed, with somewhere urgent to be. The nearest plane was a grey ghost of itself. The one beyond it had gone entirely.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said the gate agent into her microphone, in the voice of a woman who has delivered a great deal of bad news in her time and has stopped apologising for weather, "the FAA has issued a ground stop for Denver International. All departures are cancelled for the remainder of today. Rebooking information is in your app. Peña Boulevard is closing at five. If you are planning to leave the airport tonight, I would plan to do that now."

Mara took out her phone, like everybody else, and opened the airline app, and watched a small grey wheel turn and turn. Then Mara opened her messages instead and typed, with her left thumb, to Joelle in Oregon: Snowed in at Denver. Don't panic. It's Thursday. Your wedding's Saturday. There is so much time. And then, because it was true, and Mara had a professional policy of honesty with brides: Probably.

The answer came back in four seconds. It was eleven exclamation marks and a picture of a goat. Mara decided to take that as calm.

The hotels went in the next forty minutes, one by one, like the last chairs in a game of musical chairs. Finally, on the fourth page of results, with one star and a photograph of a fireplace, the Plainsview Hotel & Conference Center, a mile off Peña by the commuter-train stop, said it had limited availability.

Mara booked nothing, because the website then crashed. But the last train out to the Plainsview stop was leaving in nine minutes, and Mara ran for it with everything she owned bumping along behind and a sentence going round and round in her head that she had said at two hundred and twelve weddings and never once thought about properly: for better, for worse.

The train was standing-room only, warm and wet and smelling of coats. It slid out of the tunnel into a white roar, and for ten minutes there was nothing to see out of the windows at all except Mara's own reflection: auburn hair gone wild with static, green eyes looking more tired than Mara would have liked, and behind Mara, at the far end of the car, a very tall man in a grey cardigan, holding the overhead rail and reading something on his phone with total concentration, as if the snow were a minor administrative matter that would be dealt with in due course.

The Plainsview lobby was chaos. There was no other word for it. There were people sitting on suitcases, three crying toddlers and one crying adult. There was a gas fireplace, burning bravely. There was a laminated easel by the door that said STORM UPDATES in red marker, with nothing written under it but a drawing of a snowflake with a sad face.

And there was the desk, with one woman behind it in a blazer and a headset, typing very fast, with the kind of calm that only comes from having given up on calm hours ago. Her badge said MARISOL. NIGHT MANAGER.

Mara reached the front of the line at 5:31. The very tall man in the cardigan reached it at exactly the same moment, from the other side, and they both stopped, and looked at each other, and then at Marisol.

Marisol looked at both of them over her glasses.

"I have two rooms left," she said. "That's it. After that it's cots in the ballroom. One is the Summit Suite on the seventh floor, which has a king bed, a view, and a jacuzzi I would not personally sit in. The other is Room 117, next to the ice machine, which has a double bed and the ice machine." She held up two key cards like a dealer showing a hand. "I don't care who gets which. I've been here since six this morning. You can work it out between yourselves, or I can give them both to the people behind you."

The tall man looked at Mara, and there was a pause in which each of them recognised that the other had been about to say something sensible and polite and was now reconsidering.

"Take the suite," said Mara. "Please. I insist. You're taller. You need more room for your knees."

The man considered this. He had a long, serious face, reading glasses hanging on a cord round his neck which he seemed faintly embarrassed about, and the expression of someone doing arithmetic in his head.

"That's very kind," he said. "And I can't help noticing that you've offered me the room with the jacuzzi the night manager won't sit in."

"I've offered you the view."

"Of a blizzard."

"It's a very good blizzard. People will talk about it for years."

He looked at the key cards in Marisol's hand, and then at Mara, and for the first time one corner of his mouth moved.

"Room 117," he said to Marisol. "Please. I like ice. I'm Canadian." He turned to Mara. "And you've had a worse day than I have. You were running for that train. I saw. I've never seen anyone run with that much luggage and that much dignity at the same time."

"You were reading your phone the entire journey."

"I can do two things at once," said the man. "It's the only skill I have."

Marisol slid the suite key across the counter to Mara without comment, and the other to him, and said "Next," in the same breath.

He gave a small formal nod over the corner of the desk, the way people do at conferences.

"Desmond Oduya," he said. "Actuary. Calgary. I was in Nashville for four days at a conference on pension risk, which you will not want to hear about, and I was supposed to be home tonight."

"Mara," said Mara. "I marry people for a living."

Desmond blinked. "Professionally? Like a priest?"

"Like a priest without the theology. A celebrant. I stand at the front and say the words. I'm supposed to be marrying two people in Oregon on Saturday afternoon." Mara looked out of the lobby window, where the car park had now gone the way of the mountains. "So that's going well."

"What are the odds," said Desmond, mostly to himself.

"Of what?"

"Of the actuary and the wedding person getting the last two rooms." He thought about it. "Low. Not as low as you'd think, in an airport. But low."

They might have said good night then, and gone up, and never spoken again. Most people in airports never do. But at that moment a burst of shrieking came from the bar off the lobby, a dim warm place called the Tailwind Lounge, with a neon sign of an aeroplane over the door. A woman in a sash that said MAID OF HONOR stood on a bench in a booth and held up a small box over her head, and six women around her cheered as if she had won something.

"Okay!" the woman shouted. "Okay! Ash! If we're stuck here, we're doing it right! We're doing all thirty-six!"

The bar cheered again. Somebody whooped. A man at the bar put his head down on his arms.

"What's all thirty-six?" said Mara.

Desmond looked at the box in the woman's hand, and his face did something complicated.

"I believe," he said, "that is a psychological instrument for making two strangers fall in love in an evening." He put his glasses on, as if to see it more clearly, and took them off again. "It goes round the internet every couple of years. Thirty-six questions. Then you stare at each other. There was a study."

"Does it work?"

"It's a small sample," said Desmond Oduya, with great seriousness. "I wouldn't bet on it."

Outside, the blizzard leaned on the windows. Inside, the fire burned, and Marisol said "Next," and the bachelorettes began to read the first card aloud, together, in unison, at the top of their voices.