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April 1995

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY

CHAPTER ONE

The wine spilled. As I reached across the table, my sleeve grazed Austin's glass and the big globe fell over, quickly spreading a circle of carmine red on the white tablecloth. Austin shot up fast, chair tipping backwards. He grabbed his napkin and spread it over the stain. I glanced at my daughter, bride-to-be Dara, her eyes widened, the slight quiver of her thin nostrils, a response Rich says she must have learned from her horse. She shot me a look—she knew I'd spent the afternoon lavishing my attention on every place card and dessert spoon. Rocco woke up from his nap by the door, barking and circling the table.

"Oh, no. Sorry!" I pressed my napkin into the dark stain, too, and moved the flowers and water carafe to cover it. Rich shooed Rocco out the door.

Austin dabbed at his tie with a cloth I grabbed from the kitchen. "Doesn't matter, Lee—good as new," he said. Austin's unusual eyes—hazel, yes, but it's the way he looks at you rather than their river-water color, as if he's surprised to find you in front of him. But glad. (I've had the odd thought that he might say, I see you. Do you see me?) I rinsed his glass in the kitchen and Rich refilled. Austin raised it: "To Rich and Lee and Charlotte! I'm a lucky guy. Thank you for this feast, and thank you, Amit and Luke, for making the trip. And everyone," he slightly bowed toward our friends, "I will be privileged to get to know you. Dara, you have my heart." Nothing broke but the glasses all around clinked hard.

All solved, except not. Damn, the spilled wine seeped into the napkins.

*  *  *

For some moments, I just want perfection. Tonight was one, the intimate celebration—family and best friends—of my Dara's imminent wedding to Austin. Dara, finally. After all her are-you-kidding-me romances—don't think of the waiter with big buttons distending his ears, the modern dancer always slipping out of recovery, the too-blond scuba diver that time in Key West. Mama always said she's glad of her granddaughter's high spirits, but she's one to overlook consequences. If we expressed misgivings, Dara always snapped, "Quit! Leave me alone. I've grown up in Hillston! And it's not Thrillston here. I need life." Many brief disasters, my bright bird, all soars and plunges. Now this opening into an exhilarating future. I was blessed, as they say around here, with meeting Rich, someone special. And now that's her great fortune, too.

Her menu, my table—white linens monogrammed with Mama's and her mother's initials. The Waterford candlesticks we brought home from our honeymoon in Ireland, and two silver champagne urns (one borrowed from the florist) filled with apricot roses. Rich's welcome-to-the-family toast, Mama on good behavior, for god's sake, and Dara and Austin's best friends, along with our dearest neighbors, Fawn and Charles, Elizabeth and Eric. Long and sparkling, two tables abutted, and the seam didn't even show. Her intimate party: now marred. The night of the first photographs for the wedding albums—Jerry, our photographer friend, came for half an hour—to be pored over decades later, when I'm up floating in the clouds and they're still walking the beach, paying taxes, and figuring out the great mystery ride that is marriage.

*  *  *

A small blip. No explosive political rants. As a state senator, Fawn can get going at times, and Eric, the town mayor, is often drawn into inflammatory discussions. Thankfully no oversharing or boring childhood anecdotes. A wine stain is not important. Rich is probably just mourning the waste of good Brunello.

Why am I careening in the sheets? Life right now seems a sweet unfolding. Dara's radiance—her eyes, the aqua blue of the inside of a glacier, the only genetic gift from Rich's overwound father. When she was small, I sometimes looked at her and wondered if she were an alien. Well, my cranky father-in-law did have those same eyes, but his were shaded by a burly monobrow, and his jaw was like the side of a meat cleaver, so you didn't really notice the sublime aquamarine. Tonight, luminous, she looked at everyone with a vibrancy and joy I'll never forget. We love Austin. Son we never got to raise? (My stillborn son when Dara was five. In thousands of moments I imagine our boy, Hawthorn Willcox, at six on a pony, at ten on the swim team, awkward at fourteen with peach fuzz. After all these years, I can barely say his name.) Is Austin my projection, is that why I attached to him from the start? The only solace for that lost oval face with faint blue- veined eyebrows and a fringe of eyelashes? I never saw his eyes but imagine them the color in that astronaut photo of Earth taken from space, swirling dark blue orbs.