campus activists, and a few Florida cracker cowboys.
As we all gathered just before the ceremony, I watched my sister, Bertie, who’d recently found the Lord, bless the non-Baptist masses with a fixed scowl of restrained piety. My brother, Joe, and his wife, Mary, struggled politely through a conversation with a local philosophy professor. Freddie and Marge showed up with banjo, guitar, and regrets from Cole—his wife, Eloise, was ill. The two of them were the most at ease, settling in among the long-haired musicians.
After a few years living in Florida, we’d resumed contact with our Clarion relations, a few of whom had even come to visit. But now I could see the shock that registered in their eyes when they saw Adam’s face, so much younger than theirs and mine. Those sideways, assessing gazes reminded me of what we had endured in our last year in North Carolina. I appreciated how much the move had spared us and opened up the girls’ lives. But I could see our Florida neighbors and friends making the same comparison now. If they had assumed I was simply aging prematurely, meeting my middle-aged siblings corrected that notion. I did not want to lie again. I did not want to be shunned again. When their eyes lingered a moment longer than normal on Adam’s face, I looked away, ignored the smolder of anxiety under my ribs, and turned my attention to other guests.
The wedding ceremony was flawless. The girls were all beautiful, especially Gracie in a long, white, cotton lace dress. Rosie set aside her overalls and donned a long dress to be the maid of honor. Lil and Sarah sang. In his dark suit, Hans looked a fetching combination of shocked and proud. He was clearly a good and reliable man. Adam and I had no qualms about him, and Hans’s family seemed to adore Gracie, but we cried at the wedding all the same.
After the short outdoor ceremony, we all ate dinner on long tables set up in the pasture. Hans, normally a rather reserved person, got drunk enough to serenade us in Dutch, then hug and kiss us all, proclaiming his love for everyone. Sarah, the official wedding photographer, captured all our goofy, happy grins. But there were no other surprises. No tainted Kool-Aid. Though I did detect the smoke of marijuana on a few of the guests.
The music went on until early in the morning. We made strong coffee and breakfast for the motley gang of stragglers who had camped all night. Then the honeymooners left for a month in Utrecht.
When they returned, Gracie was almost four months along and beginning to show. They continued living in Gracie’s small apartment, where they would stay until the lease ran out or the baby was born, whichever came first, then live with us for a few months after the birth while Hans completed his degree. We counted down the weeks.
Several times I had bouts of anxiety about the baby, though no nightmares as I’d had when I was pregnant with Gracie. Once I asked Adam, “What should we tell her? Should we warn her that he might not look right at first?” I was asking only about the baby, but as the words came out of my mouth, I thought of all her questions that would naturally follow.
My question seemed to surprise Adam. “I don’t think there’s really anything to warn her about. What good would it do? It would just upset her, like you were before she was born. The girls were all fine and our grandchildren will be, too. And that’s all that matters.”
I recalled my anxious examinations of the girls when they were little. My question suddenly seemed disloyal and overly fearful. But Adam’s face, as he answered, was devoid of anxiety, open and free of judgment. Something in his eyes then reminded me of Addie’s response, years before, when I’d asked her if it bothered her to have no past, no explanations or stories for herself. “I am,” she’d simply asserted. Unlike me, A. had never needed explanations or stories. It also occurred to me then, as it had in those first moments of Gracie’s life, that whatever Adam saw in his children or grandchildren, however unusual to anyone else, might seem natural and familiar to him.
I soothed myself with lighthearted warnings to Gracie and Hans about the particularly intense “newborn” look of Hope babies, but did not share my anxieties. In those last months, when Gracie grabbed our