hand between his arm and warm body, and together, we stepped off the porch and onto the lawn. My gown met the grass with a swish, and one satin heel sank slightly. We faced the driveway, on the opposite side of the house from the ocean. As we’d practiced the day before, we stopped and waited for our cue: the sound of the string quartet. To our right, around the corner and beyond our view, were the backs of our guests. Those who were not craning their necks to watch our entrance were likely staring out at the harbor, which was at its most beautiful this time of day, winking in the afternoon sun. This was the golden hour when the lobster boats chugged back toward Snow Point with flocks of seagulls wheeling behind them, waiting for chum to be chucked overboard. What the gulls didn’t catch would descend to the inlet’s sandy floor and become dinner for the scavengers below—so much vibrant life invisible.
The Wedding March began.
We had taken only a couple of steps forward when my father stopped me and leaned in close. This was the inevitable moment when a father walks a daughter down the aisle—a moment I’d never thought about because my father was unconventional; he wasn’t that kind of dad. When I was a teenager, his biggest concern about my dating was not what might be happening in the back seat but whether I wore a seat belt. “Seventeen-year-old boys are knuckleheads behind the wheel,” he’d told me on countless occasions. “Complete fucking idiots.” Exactly what bit of paternal wisdom Paul Brodeur would offer at this moment, I couldn’t imagine. It wouldn’t be a platitude, because my father didn’t have a Hallmark bone in his body. It wouldn’t be a blessing, because he didn’t believe in God. But I was his only daughter, about to get married, and he’d brought us to a halt for a reason. The stringed instruments continued to play, beckoning us around the corner and past the point of no return, and my father’s handsome face broke into a smile. He motioned toward his car, parked on the public landing just beyond my mother’s property, a red Toyota Camry station wagon with north of two hundred and fifty thousand miles on the odometer, a point of pride.
“Give me the word, darling girl,” he said, “and we can just hop in my old heap and go fishing instead.”
I laughed—it was a joke, right?—and suddenly we were both laughing, which had been my dad’s intention, no doubt. And we were still laughing a few steps later as we rounded the bend to where two hundred heads turned to greet us. Every face was lit up by the afternoon sun. Every face beamed happiness at us—even Lily’s. Margot smiled confidence my way and I held tightly her lace handkerchief, my something borrowed. What reason could there be to feel anything but joy? A laughing bride, young and beautiful, her arm linked with her dashing father’s, a handsome bridegroom waiting in the distance. Buoyed by all this love, I felt relief wash over me. The ghosts were nowhere in sight. Everything was going to be okay.
* * *
After the ceremony, we all meandered across the lawn to the guesthouse, where champagne, a raw bar, and other delicacies awaited. The bridal party posed for some formal, portrait-style pictures and then lined up at the edge of the property under the shade of the lollipop tree where I’d spent so many evenings waiting for Malabar and Ben. Our backs were to the ocean, granting our guests that view as they dutifully filed past, my father the unwitting buffer between my mother and the Southers. I swallowed my first glass of champagne in two large gulps and savored the feel of it washing down into my legs.
* * *
In the photographs, we were all smiles and champagne flutes. There was not a single candid shot that revealed the mother of the groom staring daggers at the mother of the bride or the mother of the bride looking longingly at the father of the groom. Everyone behaved well, and nothing appeared out of the ordinary. The reception was an extravaganza of ice-cold cherrystone clams, plump briny oysters, curled pink shrimp the size of thumbs.
The wedding album does reveal a metamorphosis, however. At some point between the ceremony and the reception that followed, my mother must have sneaked off to retrieve the necklace. In photographs taken of Malabar during the