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at their age? Yes. Will I try to talk her out of it? You bet. But that’s not for tonight. Tonight we are celebrating . You are going to fix your face and we are going to get upstairs and smile and clap and pose for the photographer and do nothing but talk about how wonderful it all is, the fact that it’s possible for two people to find each other this late in life. We’re going to say all of the things everyone wants to hear. And we’re going to toast my mother and your father—no, not you. You’ve had enough to drink.” Rachel stood and tugged her dress back into place. “But the rest of us are going to raise a glass and I’m finally going to eat some roast beef—and Annette? You are going to adore the cake, so perhaps this lovely friend of yours will make sure you sit down to a nice fat slice.”
    She put a hand on the ladies’-room doorknob and paused, struggling for kinder words. “It’s strawberry,” she informed the other two women, both silent and staring at her. “With a fondant icing.”

Three
A VERY
    The food had been so fucking bad he thought it might have been a joke. Seriously. It was hard to comprehend the piece of chicken that had shown up on his plate—poor, poor chicken—stretched out and pounded flat and curled up halfway around a still-frozen shard of butter that had a small piece of red paper stuck to it. As if to compensate for the moisture-less meat, its accompanying puddle of mashed…what was it?…cauliflower had come ringed with a thin, grayish water—sauce? Dish soap? Sweat from a line cook’s greasy forehead? Avery dragged a fork slowly through the mess, amazed. Strange, though, how all these people were chewing and smiling and chatting in ordinary tones over these plates of misery. An urge to burst out laughing bubbled up in him, but Avery contented himself instead with minute examinations of the bleached-out celery salad—what was this herb, for example, tiny flakes of which clung to the wilted vegetable with admirable tenacity even as he tried to scrape some off with a fingernail. Rosemary? No smell whatsoever. An ashy taste, kind of like licking a match head.
    But by now at least someone had cleared everything supposedly edible off the table, including the piece of cake that had appeared in front of Avery with one clear thumbprint deeply imprinted on its thick icing. White icing, of course. He realized that the entire meal, from the glass of champagne that sat in front of him, untouched, until its golden showers of bubbles dimmed to a dull stillness, to that entire chicken/dishwater plate to the dessert finale, had been white, or beige, or somewhere in between.
    Actually, Avery was glad. Far better for him to encounter all the glorious misery of a truly bad meal, in which he could lose himself, than to suffer through a decent dinner where he would be forced to eat boring bites of unmemorable, unexceptionable food with nothing then to distract him from the country-club chatter that swirled all around his grandfather’s big night. And the food, its excellent awfulness, kept him parked in this same seat all evening, fascinated—kept him, that is, from walking by the bar. Which wasn’t a bar at all, of course, but two long rectangular folding tables set up in a side room just off the dance floor. Earlier, he’d been by just once, just to look—quickly, sidelong—at the rows of square-sided bottles, each slippery now from the harried bartenders’ wet hands, lined up casually next to fanned-out stacks of little cocktail napkins and bowls of pimento olives and those snotty little onions that came three on a stick when you asked for it that way. But this wasn’t a martini crowd—no, the big draw here was white wine, dozens of bottles bobbing in plastic tubs on the floor behind the long table swathed in starchy cream-and-green polyester cloths. Cheap, thick glasses were set out upside down, the way they never should be, gathering condensation inside their bowls and a musty