That Old Cape Magic

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 papertowel 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 hurtwhen 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.”
    “Jesus,” Griffin said, feeling genuine sympathy for the man. His wife’s finger was a truly gruesome sight, enough to make a squeamish man light-headed, and he was, like his father before him, a squeamish man.
    “Don’t you faint, too,” she said, slipping the hand under her Johnnie.
    Back in the men’s room, after washing his face, Griffin had congratulated himself that the abstraction and confusion he’d felt after being pulled from under the hedge had mostly dissipated, but now, studying his wife, he wasn’t so sure. “I guess my question would be, why did you have to get undressed for them to set your finger?” Also, how in the world had she
gotten
undressed with her finger bent back like that?
    “We discovered something else.” She pulled the Johnnie forward, exposing her left side and part of her breast, beneath whichthere was a three-inch gash. It hadn’t bled much, but it looked deep. “I’m going to need stitches.”
    Okay, it had been a bizarre day, Griffin thought, with its mazes and man-eating hedges and collapsing wheelchair ramps and dead ventriloquist parents, but
this
had to be the strangest thing yet. Think about it. He’d spent most of his adult life with this woman. He’d forfeited the right to admire her body, though it was even