“And now, it gives me great, great pleasure to introduce to you the bride and groom—” But the bandleader was drowned out by the room’s sudden outburst of warm applause, and even a few hooting cheers, before he could finish with the phrase Rachel had been most curious to hear aloud: “—Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Trevis.” She stood to the side of the Waugatuck Tennis Club’s main dining room and watched her mother gaily cross the dance floor on Jerry’s arm, a green disco spotlight swirling around them.

“Ladies and gentlemen, their first dance.” A respectful hush fell across the crowd as the Moonlight Express Band swung easily into “Night and Day,” and Winnie put her hand lightly on Jerry’s upper arm, where the fabric of his suit was all bunched up.

Rachel Brigham was having trouble experiencing this moment, in which her nearly eighty-year-old mother danced with her new husband on their wedding day; all she could sense was the pressure of expectation from friends and neighbors throughout their small town, even those not invited. Was she supposed to cry? Smile? Both? Everyone Rachel had talked to, in the weeks leading up to this event, from the caterer’s assistant to customers at the store to Lisa, her dental hygienist, had wanted to know How does it feel? With an airlock-tight gaze fixed on her, they would ask: What was it like for Rachel to see her mom fall in love again this late in life? Wasn’t it unbelievably sweet and hopeful? Wasn’t it a testament to the power of…something?

Maybe what they wanted was a little dirt. To have her express a fraction of dismay, some sense of loss about her father—dead now twelve years—or even for her to slip quickly into a knowing ridicule. After all, there was plenty that was ridiculous about all of this: the band, the arranged flowers, the cake, all produced for a couple whose combined age spanned a century and a half. More than once, Rachel had suffered pangs of embarrassment on her mother’s behalf, while helping to plan this wedding that everyone in town had been talking about. Why couldn’t Winnie have a small ceremony with Judge Greenberg, and then a lunch at La Finestra, for twenty, maybe thirty people? But one of her mother’s best, and most infuriating, qualities was a blithe disregard for what other people would think. Most of the time, Rachel found this admirable, or wanted to.

She watched Winnie step tremulously, lightly, back and forth to the syrupy music, Jerry’s big arms held stiffly around her.

Why were the most important things the hardest to say? The friends who wanted a glimpse at Rachel’s emotions said nothing—asked nothing—about what had really changed for her. Nothing about the obvious fact of Jerry’s money, and the sudden, immense difference between what her mother now had and what she herself did not. How could they, when Winnie and Rachel themselves had addressed it only through the most fleeting, joking comments. For example, what they imagined Jerry’s high-powered daughter Annette must think of Hartfield’s one hair salon, where men’s cuts were still fourteen dollars, and women crowned with tinfoil took amiable turns under the chipped pink metal hood of the one ancient dryer.

Did they want her to admit that it had been a long, long time since a man had held her the way Jerry was holding her mother, out there on the dance floor? Well, she could do that. She’d be the first to do that, say how long it had been. As she stood there watching, Winnie tipped her head down slowly and knocked her forehead ever-so-softly against Jerry’s chest; he reached under her chin and lifted her face, all while they kept dancing, so that when their eyes met again, he could say something to her without words: Yes, I’m here. Yes, this is really happening. Rachel held herself very, very still.

It had been such a long time.

One person, at least, wasn’t struck dumb by the display of love out there on the dance floor. Her husband, Bob, was still talking over the music, straining to be heard by the rest of their table, where Danny, Rachel’s brother, and his wife, Yi-Lun, were also seated. Bob’s voice, ever since the accident, was louder than he seemed able to recognize without a nudge from Rachel. It was as calm and unflappable as ever, only louder.

“The eventual goal would be a book deal, of course, but my writing teacher seems to think that if I place the first chapter as a stand-alone piece in a magazine—”

Her mother laughed at something a friend called out from a nearby table. Rachel willed herself to be in the moment. Like in a yoga class.

“Right, and now I’m bringing in various other angles, like this whole industry of self-help experts that’s sprung up in the past few years.”

Isn’t this writing itself basically a part of that? Rachel thought. Bob had started taking writing classes just after he was out of the hospital. The first one had been designed to reintegrate people into their lives after medical trauma—if Rachel remembered correctly, it had been called something like Writing to Heal. (There was one woman in the class who, week after week, practiced typing her name using the toes of one bare foot.) Rachel and Bob used to joke about some of these programs, like the one that had him solemnly repeat out loud statements like, “I accept that I am different. I accept that things have changed.” But Bob had taken to writing with a fervor that surprised Rachel, and now he had joined a long-term workshop, at the local college, called Write Your Life.

“It won’t just be about me,” Bob went on, speaking to Danny and Yi-Lun. “I mean, the first part is—that’s the hook, my experience, what it was like to wake up in the hospital three weeks after it happened.”

“I’m holding out for René Russo,” Rachel interrupted, with her back still to the table. “You know that actress? She can play me in the movie version.”

There was a blessed pause, and a polite murmured response from someone. Rachel could see both her daughters standing on the other side of the room, near one of the Trevis family tables. Melissa, as usual, was chattering intently to Lila, who steadily watched her grandmother. Rachel wished that Winnie had said something, anything, to Lila about having to miss her last diving meet of the year—well, it wasn’t a meet, she knew, but an end-of-season celebratory “showcase” in which several teams would display all those twists, flips, and half-turns without pressure of official competition. Lila had simply shrugged when Rachel, apologetically, told her what the date of the wedding would be. And of course you couldn’t expect Winnie to rearrange everything based on the Brighton Water League’s Saturday schedule. Still, it would have been nice if Winnie had remembered, and said something. It was so unlike her.

Even though the silence behind her continued, Rachel was sure that her husband hadn’t finished yet. Shouldn’t she interrupt now? Turn and lay a hand on his arm, direct his attention to the way Winnie was twirling carefully to Cole Porter? The bride wasn’t even fighting to look demure—no, she grinned up at Jerry with all the subtlety of a moony fifteen-year-old.

“The interesting thing is how the Internet factors in, how it can connect all the different groups, disseminate some of the cutting-edge research so much faster—in fact, I’m guest-blogging this week on this site called Skullcrack dot com—”

“Bob. We’re up, I think.” Rachel tapped him a little desperately on the arm. “Danny, go cut in and get Mom. Their song’s almost over.”

“That’s great,” Danny said, standing up. “Listen, an old buddy of mine from college is doing something at Random House—or maybe it’s the other one. Let me know if you want me to shoot him an e-mail, put you two together.”

Rachel shot a look at Danny and managed to pull Bob out onto the dance floor.

“All right, Ray,” Bob said. “I’m coming.” They watched Danny smoothly take over from Jerry, who stepped back and stood awkwardly alone on the dance floor. At once, Rachel realized her mistake and dropped Bob’s hands.

And then Winnie stopped dancing too. “Oh, why not one more with my new husband,” she said lightly, but with a frown at both of her children.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Rachel said. “Jerry, how clumsy of me. May I have this dance?” The five of them were now standing in an uncertain huddle in the middle of the room. And now someone would have to go sit down again—with everyone watching. Where on earth was Annette, Jerry’s daughter? Rachel scanned the tables in vain, as the lead singer built to a croon.

“Bob, you should probably—” But he had already left and was crossing the floor alone, and that slight drag of his left foot, a split-second hitch she rarely noticed anymore, was suddenly much more apparent. Rachel thought he might leave the room altogether—he was heading in the opposite direction from their table—but then she saw him stop in front of their girls, confer for a moment, and lead Lila by the hand onto the dance floor. When they began a father-daughter waltz, Rachel heard murmurs as the room warmed with approval.

“No rest for the weary,” Jerry said. “You might have taken pity on an old man.” Despite this, he swung her around firmly and precisely, in the style of someone who has put in considerable time at dances. Jerry was not, Rachel realized, one to let a woman lead.

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” she said, trying to keep up. She and Bob would have been merely swaying back and forth.

“I want you to know that your mother will be very well taken care of,” Jerry said.

“Oh,” Rachel said, surprised and touched at this stiff and formal speech. “I’m so happy for you both. It’s wonderful how much you care for her—I mean,” Rachel quickly corrected herself, “How much you love her.” For God’s sake, she told herself. Quit being so prim.

“Yes,” Jerry said, as if this was beside the point. “The mutual funds are a little flat this year; I’ll be making some changes there. But I’ve set up two accounts for her at a decent rate. And then this business with the trust—well, I’ll be meeting with Jack Moynihan next week, so it all should—”

“That’s all fine, Jerry. Really.” Rachel glanced around. “Maybe Danny would be the better person to—”

“I’ve already spoken to your brother. But he lives in San Francisco. You’re here.”

“That’s true,” Rachel said. “How does Annette…” She trailed off. “I’ll handle Annette,” Jerry said. “She’ll come around—I know she will. She’s just had a tough time at work recently. She and the board—never mind. You just leave that to me, all right?”

“All right,” Rachel said, oddly relieved in the face of Jerry’s brusque, all-business manner. Sometimes she forgot he had been all business, for many years, as the founder of two separate Chicago companies—what were they, something to do with manufacturing—both built from scratch and sold at incredible profit. Now he technically presided over a corporation that had tripled those earlier efforts—TrevisCorp. Annette was apparently CEO—or CFO. Or COO? Rachel had seen but not read the copies of the industry magazines Winnie proudly displayed, where Jerry or his Midwestern empire had been lavishly profiled, accompanied by photos of a glowering, younger Jerry Trevis. But in the three months since he had met and now married her mother—shocking, that three months—her own interactions with this gruff man had consisted of a couple of exhausting meals where everyone tried very hard to make small talk. Now she got a glimpse of how he must have been during those boom years, when he had been her age.

Still, she strained to find Annette, to try to gauge her expression during this interminable song. Wouldn’t she like to cut in to dance with her father? There was the head Trevis table, full of relatives she had met yesterday but couldn’t keep straight, and no Annette in sight. She couldn’t still be at the bar, where Rachel had glimpsed her last. However, there was Annette’s son, Avery, sitting right next to Melissa, and he seemed to be nodding politely enough while Mel pointed something or somebody out. Rachel pushed back at Jerry, who was attempting to turn her around. She wanted to keep an eye on this kid Avery, especially with what she’d heard about him from Winnie. Hardly a kid—a young man, tall and wiry and slouching in an expensive-looking jacket and tie. He had that artfully spiky hair all these guys wore, and it was the pure blond color that Annette’s must have been before she began all that expensive tinting and frosting. Those sharp good looks—and that calm air of solitude. That was it: Avery didn’t seem fidgety or bored or sarcastic—any of those usual, familiar teenage poses. Instead he looked perfectly at ease sitting by himself, scanning the crowd. Trouble. Rachel felt a surge of motherly sympathy for Annette.

“There’s something else,” Jerry said, and he was so intent on speaking that he continued to steer Rachel through the end of the song and right into the next one. “It’s not my place to say, but that’s never stopped me before. And I say it’s a damn shame what you’ve been through, with—” Here Jerry tilted his head toward the place where Bob had been dancing.

“Yes, it’s been a rough few years.” Her standard reply. “But we’re lucky, of course.”

“No, I wouldn’t say so. And I’m not talking about his accident. I’m talking about his job.”

Rachel sucked in her breath. “Well. The pace at the firm…it got to be too much, afterward. The strain…”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“It’s supposed to help, all the writing. It’s good for him, I guess. For now, at least, while he’s on leave.” Rachel was jostled by a couple dancing nearby. The floor was crowded now, though her mother and brother had left.

“He’s writing his autobiography? At his age?”

“Well, it’s more like…a kind of therapy.” She petered out, suddenly exhausted. “It’s supposed to help him deal with the whole—you know—memory thing.”

“In my opinion, a man attends to his family’s needs and not to his own literary”—here Jerry waggled his big head back and forth—“whims.”

Rachel sighed. She knew she should feel offended, but Jerry’s blunt assessment of the situation soothed her. Their own friends mostly danced around the subject.

Jerry went on. “And I think now that he’s back on his feet, things should change. When are you moving home?”

“Technically,” Rachel said, “we are home.”

Jerry snorted. “You know what I mean.”

“I sure do,” she said, matching his tone note for note, and startling herself. Jerry pulled back to get a better look at her, pleased. For a second, she basked in their sudden shared skepticism, a little secret exchanged in public, right there on the dance floor.

They were still marching in circles to “Strangers in the Night.” Rachel saw that most of the tables were beginning to be served their salad, and she hoped Jerry might allow them to sit down soon. She was starving, and of course the dinner would be excellent—Winnie and she had pored over faxed menus and finally decided on the roast beef and a chicken Kiev, which was Waugatuck’s specialty.

“I’ve asked him plenty of questions about his head,” Jerry said, determined to continue. “And he seems all up to snuff.”

“Actually the doctors say—”

“I’m no medical expert, but seems to me he’s healthy enough, now. Dodged a bullet, is what I’d say.”

“Maybe,” Rachel said. “But he doesn’t remember much, in any case. The accident, the surgeries—nothing. It’s all a blank.”

“You mean he doesn’t know how he—”

“It’s just gone, is all,” Rachel said. “Or that’s what they tell me.” Listening to this old man, a near stranger, voice every one of her own doubts was unfolding a surprising, slow warmth inside her, the sense of…finally!

“Let me get this straight,” Jerry said. Rachel noticed his breathing was a bit labored. “Your husband quit his job, for all intents and purposes…to write a whole book about a day he can’t even remember?”

Rachel stifled a smile. Not bad, she thought. There were two tiny medical bandages taped to the side of his head, near his ear. “It’s your wedding day,” she said. “Let’s just enjoy it.”

“One last. Thing,” huffed Jerry. They had slowed considerably, although the song was now a Motown classic, designed to get the floor jumping. “The house.”

“Hmm?” Surely the entrées would be out by now.

“Your mother won’t want to do anything substantial. She has a notion it will bother me. But I told her you’d help—you ladies can fix it up all you want. Encourage her. Good for her.”

“The house?” Rachel followed Jerry’s stiff gait off the dance floor. She waved back—hi there! Just one second!—distracted, to several friends who beckoned. “What are you talking about?”

“Scotch and soda,” Jerry said, and sat heavily. Not his table, but close enough. “Someone move my drink?”

“Jerry,” Rachel said, “What house?” Though a sharp little awareness now bloomed inside her. The time she’d teased her mother about having to clear out closet space, make room for a man’s things, in her tidy one-bedroom apartment. The way Winnie, hemming and hawing, avoided her eyes.

“Fifty Greenham, of course,” Jerry said. He squinted up at her, annoyed. “Closed yesterday. Is that the waiter?”

She couldn’t have.

Rachel stumbled through a conversation with Marilyn French, who’d played the piano during cocktail hour, and excused herself suddenly, rudely. Then she was caught by Sandy Hinton, who fretted lightly in the form of a joke that no one from Hand Me Down, the children’s clothes consignment store where Rachel worked, had called her back yet about a double stroller, hardly used. If they weren’t interested, surely she could find…Rachel promised to pick it up on Monday, and broke away. Her cheeks were burning. No. She couldn’t have—Jerry had it all wrong. Not that business-mogul Jerry could make a mistake about something this substantial. Not about that property—the one everyone in Hartfield talked about, a true 1920s Tudor right on Greenham Avenue, a stately oak-lined street that arched high above the center of town. Rachel shook her head, dumbfounded. A part of her had to admire the sheer craziness of this endeavor. He bought that place? For two eighty-year-olds to live in? It must be falling down, now nothing but the shell of a once-grand property—a structure people slowed down to point out as one of Hartfield’s eccentric oddities.

“My God, Mom,” Rachel muttered to herself, in the hallway leading to the restrooms. She leaned back against the wall. Well, we might need a little more room, she remembered now, was what Winnie had said, that afternoon, turned away and fussing with some grocery bags. Rachel had assumed she meant a two-bedroom condo! So Winnie had known, even then. Why hadn’t she said anything?

But Rachel knew why, and she closed her eyes. It was cooler downstairs, quiet. Her heels sank into the thick, salmon-colored carpet, and she could feel the grainy pattern of the metallic toile wallpaper against her bare shoulders. On the one hand, she had sympathy for her mother’s position. Rachel’s own move, last year, certainly made it hard, if not impossibly awkward, for anyone to raise the subject of Hartfield real estate in her presence.

Melissa called it “the switcheroo,” and Winnie had been one of its biggest supporters.

“Please.” She’d scowled when Rachel once ventured fears about, well, what people would think.

And there certainly hadn’t been anything on the market, anything close to what they would need or could afford, without changing the girls’ school midyear. Neither Lila nor Mel had protested once the plan was explained to them—though probably this wasn’t healthy—and Bob was just relieved, happy to find a solution, a way of accepting that leave of absence…and so that left Rachel. She had signed on, full of misgiving, and so they had moved. If you could call it that, when their address, 144 Locust Drive, didn’t even change.

Their house’s attached two-bedroom rental unit had intimidated Bob when they were first shown the property, that summer before Lila was born. He hadn’t liked the idea of being a landlord, hadn’t liked the word itself, and had visions of endless tenant disputes, late-night phone calls about plumbing problems. But both Rachel and their Realtor, Billie, had convinced him otherwise, Rachel so deeply in love with the square-sided painted-white brick house on Locust that she felt she would happily plunge any stopped-up toilet herself, even seven months pregnant. And even Bob would admit that everything had gone smoothly. Billie always took care of finding the right people, and the renters had been a series of quiet young couples on the first leg of their exodus from Manhattan, a lot like Rachel and Bob had been. Mostly, they got pregnant and then moved out. Meanwhile, Rachel and Bob—and later Lila and Melissa—paid hardly any attention to that part of the house, or the round pale stones paving a discreet path around to the separate side entrance.

Then, last year, several factors aligned all at once, like tumblers in a lock clicking into place. Once it became clear that Bob was struggling to keep up, the partners at his firm offered a year’s leave at half pay—or demanded one. (It was never made clear to Rachel which.) The Copenhavers, who had rented for almost three years, decided to move to Boston and open a health-food store, and gave only one month’s notice. And Billie, when Rachel called in a panic, said that she might have one prospect, a single banker who traveled a lot…but that he wanted something bigger than their unit. Something much bigger.

So the plan was hatched: keep the house, lease the main part, live in the smaller unit. For a while, until Bob got back on his feet. It wasn’t unheard of, Billie assured them, but this didn’t really hold true for Rachel. In a matter of weeks, the Brighams went from four bedrooms to two, from three full baths to one and a half, from the center of their home to its shoved-off-to-the-side appendage. Or at least that’s how Rachel felt, especially on the nights where she would lie awake and listen to Vikram Desai, a perfectly pleasant man, a total stranger, move around her kitchen. She’d follow his footsteps across the cream-colored tiles she’d chosen six years ago, up the stairs where the girls posed for Christmas photos, and into what used to be her bedroom. Hers and Bob’s, that is.

Here in the Waugatuck hallway, little by little Rachel became aware of a sound—not the music and voices at the reception upstairs, but from behind her. Behind the wall, inside the ladies’ room. A high-pitched wail that came and went. Gasps, then a pause. Without thinking, she went to the door and pulled it open.

Annette, slumped on a low overstuffed stool in front of the dressing table mirror, raised her head. Another woman stood nearby, hovering anxiously. She shot a distressed look at Rachel.

“Oh, perfect,” Annette said loudly, waving an arm. Her makeup was smeared and her eyes raw. “Un-fucking-believable.”

“Excuse me,” Rachel said, taken aback by the slap of anger. She turned to leave.

“Don’t you run away now! You came to find me, well—here I am. You want to drag me back upstairs to that whole—Can you believe this?” Annette turned to her friend, a shorter woman in a gray silk suit, who was trying to hush her.

The friend nodded to Rachel, as if they shared an understanding, and then toward the door. “She’s just a little upset,” she said. “Probably it would be better if—”

“What is it with you people? Don’t you have a single ounce of dignity? Do you really think I’m going to let my father get suckered into losing everything at the end of his life? He’s worked damn hard for what he’s made, and if you think I’m going to just stand around while you and your mother take what you—”

“Annette,” the friend groaned. “Don’t.”

“—please…Do you know what my lawyer says? You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

“Well, I’m sorry you feel this way,” Rachel said. “And to tell you the truth—”

She stopped, confused. Though she’d only spoken with Annette briefly, once or twice before, Rachel could tell that Jerry’s daughter was none too pleased about this marriage. But she’d had no idea that Annette was this furious. And all along, Rachel had somehow assumed that Annette’s objections to the marriage were her own—that everything about this gaudy spectacle, this wedding, was unseemly and unnecessary, a bit tacky and more than a little embarrassing. But now, underneath Annette’s wine-soaked vehemence, Rachel heard something else: fear. The kind of sharp, blinding fear that springs from loss.

“It must be hard,” she said. “With his moving here. But I think—”

“This all makes me sick,” Annette moaned, and she really did look ill—white in the corners of her mouth, and trembling. “Sitting up there, smiling while you all wink at each other and count your lucky stars that my father has decided to act like a fool. Like an idiot. I won’t let you do this to him. His reputation—what this would have done to my mother—” She choked on a sob.

“Annette,” Rachel began. She might have taken a step closer.

“Don’t touch me!” Annette shrieked. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry,” she said to the friend, suddenly conciliatory. “I’ll get it together in a minute. I just won’t be pitied. Not by her.”

Rachel went quickly past them into the next room. As she expected, there was a stack of small plastic cups on a shelf above the sinks. She filled one, hands shaking.

Back in the dressing room, Rachel set the water down in front of Annette and pulled up a stool, close enough to see the dots of mascara beaded along the other woman’s lower eyelashes.

“Now you listen to me. That is my mother up there, and it’s her wedding day, and I won’t have you making a drunken scene to ruin even one minute of it for her. Do you hear me?” Despite the heat of the moment, Rachel recognized her own tone immediately: it was the one she used when one of the girls had really crossed the line.

“For the record—not that it matters—I had no idea Jerry had bought a house. That house.” Annette started to interrupt, but Rachel barreled ahead. The friend was observing this with a small, impressed smile. “Do I think it’s insane, 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.”