That Old Cape Magic

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, especiallyfor 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 ashis 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