Marguerite nudged him, noticing he’d already drained most of his champagne. “That’s for the toasts.”

“Complete this sentence and win a prize,” Harold told her. “Give… it… a…”

Having no women to speak for them, the final two-Sunny and a man in a wheelchair-had no alternative but to plead their own cases. The latter had a lopsided smile, if that’s what it was and not a grimace, that bespoke a recent stroke. During the previous introductions he’d stared steadfastly at his cutlery as if he expected the utensils to become dangerously animated. There was a vacant chair, complete with place setting, on either side of him, suggesting that everyone had concluded his condition might be contagious. In a loud, braying voice he announced that he was the groom’s sixth-grade math teacher, which cracked the lesbians up more than anything anybody’d said so far. “Animal House,” Griffin whispered to Joy, who, no surprise, didn’t get the reference. Though she enjoyed movies, even their most iconic moments left no lasting impression on her, and she’d always considered his own ability to quote such scenes verbatim as rather perverse.

Which left Sunny, who managed to say only his name and that he lived in Washington, D.C., before the DJ chose that moment to conduct a sound check of his nearby equipment. Harold swiveled in his chair to watch, a clear indication that he couldn’t care less who Sunny was or what he’d done to be stranded at the misfit table. A loud peal of laughter from the front of the tent attracted the attention of the lesbians, who stood to applaud something, Griffin couldn’t tell what, and the man in the wheelchair resumed staring at his knife and fork. The Griffins, of course, didn’t need to be introduced to Sunny, which left only Marguerite to give him her undivided attention. “Go on,” she said. “I want to hear all about you,” and if Griffin hadn’t already decided to like her, he would have then. But the best man had risen to give the first of the afternoon’s strained comic toasts, and Sunny, ever good-natured, turned his chair around to watch and listen.

By the time they were invited to raise their glasses in a toast to the bride and groom, Harold’s glass was empty. Perhaps to emphasize this fact, after everyone else had drunk to the toast, Sunny rose to his feet, his glass held high, and proposed a toast of his own for table seventeen. “Here stop and spend a social hour in harmless mirth and fun,” he intoned, grinning, for some reason, at Griffin and then Marguerite. “Let friendship reign. Be just and kind and evil speak of none.” After which they all leaned forward to clink glasses, and Griffin found the ting of Harold’s empty flute against all the other full ones particularly rewarding.

“What an odd toast,” Joy whispered. “Do you suppose it’s Korean?”

“I don’t think so,” Griffin said. It felt not only familiar but recently so. He could feel the dim memory spooling toward the front of his brain, but then his cell phone vibrated and it was gone. “Again?” Joy said in disbelief when he showed her who it was.

“I’ll take it outside,” he said, getting to his feet. “Mom, hold on, okay?”

It took him a minute to get out of the tent, and when he put the phone to his ear, he realized that his mother, unaccustomed to being told to wait, had been talking the whole time. “Mom, I haven’t heard a word of this. Is everything all right?”

“Of course everything’s all right.”

“Then-”

“Have you done it yet?”

“Done what?”

“Put your father in the drink.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Scattered his ashes. Laid him to rest.”

“Not yet, no.”

“I think you should put him on the bay side. He was that kind of man, don’t you think? Wordsworth was his favorite poet. ‘Emotion recollected in tranquility’ and all that nonsense, which all boiled down to being afraid of the surf. He hated being tossed about, feeling the power of something greater than himself.”

The music from inside the tent ratcheted up now, and Griffin turned his back (as if that would help) and covered his other ear with his hand (which did help, but not much).

“What is that awful racket?” his mother wanted to know.

“Music. I’m at the wedding, Mom.”

“What wedding? You told me you were there to scatter your father’s ashes.”

“I told you several things. You remembered one of them.”

“Somewhere on the North Shore, I think. Maybe Sandwich.”

“That’s barely on the Cape,” Griffin said. “You hated Sandwich. We might as well put him in the Canal.”

“I don’t know who you mean by we. I’m simply making a suggestion. The decision is yours.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said, and should have hung up right then. Instead he asked, “Do you remember the Browning family? From the Cape?”

“Don’t tell me you ran into them.”

Which was surprising. He hadn’t expected the name to register, and that it did immediately made him curious. “Are we talking about the same people? I must’ve been eleven or twelve and-”

“Twelve. They were in the cottage across the way. There was a horrible muddy playground in the center of things, and they were diagonal. Near Orleans, wasn’t it? Anyway, I wouldn’t put your father there. Think North Shore. Find some calm, brackish water and pour him in. He’d prefer it. Actually, the Canal isn’t such a bad idea-”

“Mom, about the Brownings-”

“You abandoned your father and me the entire two weeks. All we heard about was Steven Browning. Your father thought it meant you were gay.”

“Peter,” he corrected her, annoyed that both Tommy and his father had leapt to the same erroneous conclusion. Was loneliness in a twelve-year-old so difficult to diagnose?

“Don’t you remember how you melted down that last night when we insisted you spend it with us?”

“You insisted?”

“And the tantrum you threw at the restaurant? The Dry Martini? No, that’s not right. The Something Martini, it was called. Anyway, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how I sat up with you all night, trying to console you?”

“You’re making this up, right?”

“And the next morning you refused to get in the car. God, what a little pill you were.”

“There was something wrong with the little Browning girl, wasn’t there? Peter’s sister.”

“Asthma, I believe. Something respiratory. The sea air was supposed to be good for her, but she ended up dying. And then of course Steven in Vietnam.”

“Mom, what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about your friend Steven Browning dying in Vietnam.”

“Mom, he’s Peter. And anyway, how in the world would you know what happened to him or his sister? We never went back there. We never saw any of them again.”

“We exchanged addresses before we left, don’t you remember? Steven wanted to keep in touch. He wrote you several letters, but you refused to write back. We got Christmas cards for a couple of years. The mother wrote when the little girl died, and then later about Steven. You were gone by then.”

“Why would you remember all this, Mom?”

“Why shouldn’t I remember things?”

“It’s unlike you. Especially people like the Brownings. You and Dad looked down your noses at them.”

He expected her to deny this accusation, but she didn’t, which meant she either hadn’t really heard it or preferred not to. Maddening, the way she blithely shopped among his conversational offerings, as if she were at a fruit bin looking for an unbruised pear. “Wait till you’re my age and memory is all you have.”

It was on the tip of Griffin ’s tongue to say that, based on this conversation, he wasn’t sure she had even that.

“Happy memories in particular you hold on to.”

“That was a happy memory? That vacation?”

“Well, it wasn’t unhappy The wheels hadn’t come off yet for your father and me. He hadn’t started the cheating yet.”

“Of course he had. You both had.”