Now you’ve done it, said Harve, who’d materialized at his elbow. How you going to figure out who’s who?

Rather than contemplate the problem, Griffin woke up.

It was raining out, less hard than in his dream but definitely coming down. The soft dream-collision had been occasioned in the real world by Marguerite getting out of bed. Not quite ready to face a new day, he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. Marguerite adored weddings and after yesterday’s she would be, he feared, in one of her best and brightest moods, and he wasn’t sure he could confront either it or her just yet. He sensed her standing there, observing him, probably suspicious, but eventually he heard the bathroom door open and close, and when the shower rumbled on moments later he realized he’d been holding his breath.

“Well, I think it was a lovely wedding,” she told him fifteen minutes later, her first words of the day, as if he’d expressed a contrarian view in his sleep. She was toweling off unself-consciously at the foot of the bed. It was amazing, really, how different she was from Joy, how confident and secure she was in her own naked, glistening skin. Even fully dressed, she always managed to convey that she was patiently waiting for someone to suggest a skinny-dip. Maybe her body wasn’t what it once was, but she remained confident there were men around who desired it and probably would be for quite some time. “Are you going to shower,” she said, “or did you have something else in mind?” That was the other thing. Marguerite loved sex, as fervently as you loved something you’d been denied when you were young and which you were now making up for.

“Shower,” he said, because they had a long drive ahead of them and a task at the end of it-the scattering, finally, of his parents’ ashes-that was unpleasant enough to have wormed its way into his dreams. “How about tonight?”

She was right, though, Griffin thought as he stepped under the burst of hot water. The wedding had been lovely-and, like all events that involved months of intricate planning, over surprisingly quickly. It had gone off without further melodrama, a well-earned blessing, all agreed, after the catastrophic rehearsal. Despite the scratches on her forearms, Laura had been, just as he’d promised her, a heartbreakingly beautiful bride. Drawing on some reserve of optimism that hadn’t been there the night before, she’d given herself over fully to richly deserved joy. Only once, just minutes before the ceremony was to commence, did she allow herself to express any fear. The bridesmaids and groomsmen were lining up at the end of the corridor for the procession, and she and Griffin were cloistered in a small anteroom. He’d told her how lovely she was and how proud he and Joy were of her, and she’d told him he looked very L.A. (he’d found a pair of very dark glasses to cover his still-hideous but not-quite-so-swollen left eye). But when Pachelbel’s Canon leaked into the room, she took a deep breath, looped her arm through his and said, “I don’t want you and Mom to get old.”

It was, of course, her familiar fear-that he and her mother would divorce-now mutated. Either that or, after yesterday, Harve and the various humiliations of old age were on her mind.

After much discussion her grandfather, battered but unbowed, had been allowed to attend the wedding. His doctors were understandably reluctant. Harve’s physical injuries were relatively minor, but the trauma he’d suffered in the hedge wasn’t insignificant, especially for someone his age. At the hospital he’d exhibited signs of confusion and agitation, though the former, according to his children, was normal and the latter occasioned by the possibility he wouldn’t get his way. The physicians finally gave in, on the condition that someone would attend him at all times.

That someone was the redoubtable Dot (damn it!), who’d finally been located down in Portland, where she’d checked into an airport motel with every intention of catching the first flight back to California in the morning. But the family, one sibling after another, had pleaded for her return, and then finally Harve himself got on the phone and told her that she was indispensable to the day’s proceedings, a fairly transparent lie, it seemed to Griffin, but apparently the very one she wanted to hear, and so the twins had been dispatched to Portland to fetch her back up the coast. At the ceremony she seemed to be in reasonably good spirits, and Griffin kept expecting her to come over and apologize for telling him to fuck off, especially since he was the only one in the family who’d showed her the slightest kindness or consideration during what he’d already come to think of as the Ordeal of the Hedge, but she rather pointedly kept her distance, as if to suggest that by correctly diagnosing and sympathizing with her plight he’d assumed responsibility for it.

The ceremony had been performed by a Unitarian minister, a friend of Andy’s family, and Joy needn’t have worried about there being too many religious overtones, because this fellow seemed utterly unencumbered by liturgical obligation. He clearly fancied himself a comedian, though, and used those parts of the service that might otherwise have been given over to prayer to relive the more memorable moments of the rehearsal dinner, which he himself had not attended but obviously had been briefed on. While the smattering of nervous laughter that his attempts at humor occasioned couldn’t have been terribly gratifying, he’d soldiered on, his faith in his own comic talent apparently as deep and unshakable as his belief in the Almighty. When he described for the edification of those who’d been present that the bride’s grandfather had had to be removed from a Venus-flytrap hedge by means of a chain saw, Harve, hearing himself alluded to, loudly asked, his voice still raspy from yesterday’s bellowing, “Who the hell is this guy?”

Griffin ’s fatherly duties kept him centered and focused during the ceremony itself, though the reception, which made fewer demands on his time, proved more of a challenge. Laura had chosen “Teach Your Children Well,” he hoped unironically, for their father-daughter dance. They were joined by Andy and his mother, who seemed not to have anticipated this tradition and were rigid with fear during its execution. Before long the floor was crowded with dancers, a statistically improbable percentage sporting gauzy bandages. As the wine began to flow and everyone began to relax and have a good time, Griffin felt increasingly adrift. He and Joy had agreed beforehand they wouldn’t dance together, fearing their daughter might break down at the sight of them. Joy, her middle finger made obscene by a large, gleaming metal splint, had already excused herself, saying the stitches in her side hurt, but Griffin suspected she felt it inappropriate to dance with Ringo at her daughter’s wedding. Perhaps there was more. Something about their body language was different today, and he wondered if they’d had words. That possibility would have cheered him had he not sensed there was a greater distance between Joy and him as well, as if their brief, unguarded intimacy at the emergency room had frightened her enough that she was determined not to risk it again.

That morning he’d suggested to Marguerite that they shouldn’t be too much of a couple, either. Knowing how much she loved to dance, he allowed that it would probably be okay if they boogied to a couple of fast numbers, but no slow, clingy stuff. If he worried about cramping her style, he needn’t have. Recognizing Sunny Kim from last year’s leftover table with a squeal of delight, she immediately dragged him out there and didn’t let him go until they’d hoofed it through three long tracks. After that she danced with Andy, with all of his groomsmen and even with Ringo, who sported an impressive hematoma on his forehead and moved, Griffin was pleased to see, like a man in a truss. When she’d exhausted all these partners, she set upon the Unitarian comic, whose expression suggested he’d become a man of the cloth as a hedge against precisely this sort of social necessity. On the dance floor he looked everywhere but at Marguerite’s chest, unintentionally providing the very comedy that had eluded him during the wedding ceremony. When she wasn’t dancing, Marguerite took refuge at the table presided over by Kelsey and her husband (“Aunt Rita? What’re you doing here?”), getting a recap of the couple’s first year of wedded bliss.