Over at the hedge, the chain saw sputtered and died. Taking advantage of the silence, he quietly said, “No, you’re going to be beautiful. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Andy pulled up then, and they climbed in, Laura next to her fiancé, Griffin into the back. The car was identical to his rental, right down to the color and features. It even had a copy of the same literary magazine on the dash. He patted his pants pocket, but felt no keys. Unless that was them dangling in the ignition. “So this is my car?” he asked, and they both turned around to stare at him.

“Yes, Dad. This is your car. You gave Andy the keys. You’re scaring me.”

Before driving off, they were treated to one last bizarre sight: Jared and Jason, shaking what remained of the mutilated hedge like madmen, until finally it surrendered from its dark center an elderly man in a wheelchair. Out Harve tumbled, somehow landing wheels down on the lawn, to wild cheers.

“He’s out,” Andy said, taking his bride’s hand. “See? Everything’s going to be fine.”

And she smiled, believing him, Griffin could tell. He’d just told her the same thing, but of course he was no longer the person from whom his daughter needed such reassurances. Which meant there was nothing to do but relax in the backseat, which was where you put people you don’t have to listen to, even when it’s their car.

The tiny regional hospital was really more of a clinic, and its usually sleepy, preseason emergency room had been overwhelmed by the first wave of injured wedding guests, not all of whom had been seen to by the time Laura, Andy and Griffin arrived, moments ahead of the ambulance bearing Joy and her father, which in turn was closely followed by a small flotilla of cars. Harve, finally pried loose from his chair, was wheeled in on a gurney Griffin caught a glimpse of him as he rolled by surrounded by EMTs. His cheeks were a grid of angry scratches, and a nasty-looking abrasion ran from his neck down his shoulder. Otherwise, he looked to be in reasonably good condition. He’d been wearing a baseball cap, and its bill had protected his eyes. Jane and June, on opposite sides of the gurney, having reluctantly given their father over to the professionals, now provided narration as they sped past the front desk: “See, Daddy? We’re at the hospital already. Look at all the nurses. You like nurses, remember? They’ll fix all your scratches…”

Harve was able to sum up his circumstance in a single, hoarse croak. “Hurt,” he said.

Curious to see how bad his own injuries were, Griffin located a men’s room off the main corridor. What he saw in the wall-length mirror shocked him. His swollen eye looked hideous, as if the eyeball had been removed from its socket, a tennis ball inserted in its place and the skin stretched over it and sewn shut. There was also a trail of dried blood beneath his left nostril, a deep scratch on his forehead and bits of hedge in his hair. Dear God, was he really going to walk his daughter down the aisle tomorrow looking like this? Would sunglasses, assuming he could find a pair, even fit over something that size? He could feel other urgent questions forming in his still-addled brain, but before he was able to resolve any of them the door to the men’s room swung open and one of the twins walked in. The stubbled one. Which was…

Unzipping, whichever twin it was stepped in front of the single wall urinal. “Okay,” he said, studying Griffin in the mirror, his urine hitting the porcelain with enough force to make Griffin envious. “Settle an argument. Jared says our family’s fucked up. I say no.”

Griffin, making a mental note that unless he was speaking of himself in the third person this was Jason, pointed to his grotesque, swollen eye.

“You shouldn’t have called us morons,” he said.

“I didn’t.” Hadn’t his mother offered that observation, in the privacy of his own brain?

“We both heard you. We were standing right there.”

“Huh,” Griffin said, reluctantly entertaining the possibility that a dead woman had, albeit briefly, taken control of his larynx.

“Also, we thought you’d pushed our father into the hedge.”

“Why would I do that, Jason?” Griffin said.

“You’ve never liked any of us,” he said, as if stating a well-known fact. “Plus you were the only one who could have done it. Standing just where he’d been with that shit-eating grin on your face. Same one you’ve got now.”

Griffin turned to examine his face in the mirror. What he saw there was a grimace, not a grin. A well-earned grimace, come to that.

“Like you were enjoying the whole thing,” Jason continued. “Jared thought the same thing.”

“Jason,” Griffin said, “you and your brother arriving at the same conclusion isn’t really a test of its validity. Seek some genetic variety would be my advice.” Griffin half expected this observation to provoke further hostility, but it didn’t.

“It’s true,” the other man chuckled. “We sort of share a brain, don’t we? Always did. No reason to call us morons, though.” Finished, he gave it a shake, zipped up and came over to the sink.

Griffin stepped aside so Jason could wash his hands. His forearms were striped with angry yew scratches, but they weren’t swollen like Laura’s. “I apologize if I called you a moron.”

“What do you mean if?”

“And I wasn’t enjoying it,” he told him, to set the record straight.

“I’m just saying it’s how you looked. Call it a misunderstanding, I guess. Anyway, nobody died, and tomorrow’s a new day,” he said, vigorously washing his hands of the old one and yanking a paper towel from the dispenser. “You think this wedding’s fucked up, you should try Iraq.”

“Yeah, sure, but New England weddings aren’t supposed to invite that kind of comparison,” Griffin said, pleased that he was again capable of making such subtle distinctions, more or less effortlessly.

“I’m only saying,” Jason shrugged, tossing his wadded-up towel into the bin. He apparently saw no need to elaborate further on what, exactly, he was only saying.

“Tell your brother all families are fucked up,” Griffin said. “It’s not an argument either of you can win.”

“That’s truly warped,” Jason said. “You know how you end up if you go through life thinking like that?”

“No, how?”

“You end up like you. One working eye, with twigs and shit in your hair.”

Griffin couldn’t help smiling, though it literally hurt to.

“I’m sorry I punched you, though,” Jason admitted thoughtfully. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I realize now it probably wasn’t just because you called me a name and pushed Pop into the hedge. The way I’m figuring it, subconsciously?” Here he pointed at his forehead, perhaps to suggest where such delicate, refined “figuring” took place. “Subconsciously, I was still pissed at you for being such a prick to my sister. You think that’s possible?”

Griffin did, consciously.

At the nurses’ station he was told his wife was in examination room 2B, where he was treated to an unexpected sight: Brian Fynch, glassy-eyed, being wheeled out of the room on a gurney On his forehead, a knot the size of an egg pushed up through his Ringo bangs. Griffin was pretty sure he hadn’t been one of those hurt when the ramp collapsed, so… what? He’d been injured at the hospital?

Inside the room, Joy, dressed for some reason in a pale blue Johnnie, was seated on the examination table, looking shell-shocked. “What happened to…” He’d been about to say Ringo, but caught himself.

His wife sighed deeply. “I warned him not to keep looking at it.” She showed him her finger, which lay at an almost anatomically impossible angle. “But I guess he couldn’t help it. He got really pale, and then…” She pointed at the wall, specifically at an indentation in the plaster that looked to be about the same size as a college dean’s forehead. Griffin had to look away lest she observe one of those vintage shit-eating grins Jason had accused him of wearing earlier. When he finally turned back, though, he saw that Joy herself was smiling. A grudging, guilty smile, but still definitely a smile. “You know the wet sound a ripe cantaloupe makes when you drop it on the kitchen floor? That’s what he sounded like.”