That Old Cape Magic

other side of the country. It was this, of course, that he truly resented. There’d been a time when Harve and Jill had themselves talked of returning to the East, but Harve was now talking about investing in a planned community called Windward Estates (Breakwind Estates, Griffin had immediately dubbed it), where they could map out their entire future in advance. On special occasions they could still entertain the family in the big common areas that centered around a mammoth pool and clubhouse, while they downsized into a smaller house that Jill wouldn’t have to work so hard to maintain. Later, they could downsize further into a condo, then into the attached assisted-living facility, then into the best nursing home money could buy, all right there in Breakwind.
    He’d described all this to his son-in-law on the phone with great enthusiasm. “What if you buy in and then change your mind?” Griffin asked.
    “We won’t,” Harve said. “Not once it’s made up. Haven’t you figured this out about us yet?”
    Actually, he had.
    It was possible Griffin was misremembering, but it seemed to him now that the need to break free of Joy’s family, to make the Great Truro Accord work for him instead of against him, began to crystallize in his mind the night of Laura’s birthday party, when Sunny Kim told him they had a lovely home. He knew that if he wasn’t careful he was going to be trapped in that lovely home for the duration. Had he and Joy argued later that night? He couldn’t recall. He’d recently received an offer to teach screenwriting in a fledgling film program in the Cal State system. Had Joy encouraged him to consider it, in order to give up screenwriting (as they’d always planned) but stay in California (as they hadn’t)?
    What did it matter? They’d done what they’d done, and it was all a long time ago. Little Sunny Kim now stood before them, a grown man. Laura had become a radiant young woman. His longtime agent and friend, who’d once terrorized their daughter with his canine antics, had woken up dead. Jesus.
    A few yards from the ceremonial arch, a perspiring string quartet stopped abruptly, mid-Pachelbel, on some invisible signal, and began a somnambulant rendition of the “Wedding March.” Everyone turned to watch the wedding party descend the porch, two by two, and wind down the sloping lawn. Andy, Laura’s boyfriend, had been commissioned to handle the photography, and he trotted halfway up to catch each bridesmaid and groomsman as they passed.
    “Laura’s friend is nice,” Griffin overheard Sunny tell Joy. “I think she’s in love.”
    “There she is,” she whispered to Griffin when Laura appearedon the porch, radiant and squinting into the sun, on the arm of a burly groomsman half a head shorter than she. Partway down the lawn she snagged a stiletto heel on the uneven ground, nearly rolling an ankle, and Griffin saw Sunny flinch, but she quickly righted herself and told her escort (unless Griffin’s long-distance lip-reading was mistaken) that she was a klutz and always had been.
    When Kelsey emerged on her father’s arm, Joy took Griffin’s hand and said, “Oh, my. Look how beautiful she is.”
    “Yes,” Sunny Kim agreed, but he wasn’t looking at the bride.

7
Halfway There
    E ach of the large round tables in the reception tent was set up for twelve, but table seventeen had only eight actual “leftovers.” The resulting gaps in the seating were an additional impediment to conversation among these strangers. Well, not complete strangers. Griffin was surprised to recognize the unhappy couple from the Olde Cape Lounge. The woman was dressed more modestly today, and her face immediately lit up when she saw him, as if his unexpected presence was further evidence that the world was a marvelous place, that it offered genuine miracles on a daily basis. Her companion seemed to have forgotten him completely. (“We met where?… Oh, right,
that
fuckin’ place.”) He’d worn a tie for the ceremony but took it off now in the tent, unbuttoning the top two buttons on his shirt as if to allow his chest hair to breathe. The table’s extreme distance from the bridal party wasn’t lost on him, though he seemed cheered by its proximity to the tent’s back flap, on the other side of which the caterers were scurrying. “Maybe we’ll get fed first, at least,” he grunted in Griffin’s direction, mistakenly concluding, just as he had the night before, that they were natural