Page 12

It doesn't mean anything. It's the best acre. You don't leave the best acre fallow out of sentiment, and sentiment is what people feel when they haven't run the numbers.

My mother came off the porch before the car had fully stopped, arms open, wrists ringing with hammered silver — ethically sourced, each piece costing more than Esteban clears in a month — which is the jewelry she wears to indicate that she has transcended material concern.

"There's my groom."

"Hello, Mother."

She took my face in both hands. Sandalwood, and underneath it, faintly, the cigarettes she has smoked in secret for thirty years and believes nobody has ever detected.

"You look tired, darling, like a man who works."

"I am a man who works." I suppressed a grin.

"We're going to fix that this week. We're going to soften you."

"Please don't."

"Harold!" she called back toward the house, without letting go of my face. "Harold, our son is here, and he is positively rigid."

My father came out barefoot, in linen the color of oatmeal, carrying a mug.

I should say something about my father. He made four hundred million dollars writing a piece of enterprise software you have never heard of and every corporation on earth is legally required to use. He has spent the decades since constructing a version of himself who never did that. Dad forages mushrooms. He has a yoga practice and fasts on a schedule he describes as listening. My father refers to his own former ambition in the third person — that fellow — as in, that fellow worked too hard, that fellow didn't know what mattered.

I love him completely. That's the part people get wrong. It is very easy to love a parent who is ridiculous.

"Sol." He folded me into arms that smelled of patchouli, woodsmoke, and money. Dad named me Solstice for a solar event. I’ve never been able to make him stop, and I have never once actually tried.

"Welcome home. Don't let your mother soften you. The world needs your edges."

"Thank you, Dad."

Then he held out the mug.

"Drink this."

"What is it?"

"Nettle."

It was warm, gray, and tasted the way a lawn looks in February. I drank some of it because he was watching, and because at thirty-eight years old I’ve not yet worked out how to say no to my father while he’s smiling at me.

"Good," he said. "Now. You're holding a tremendous amount of stress in the jaw."

"I'm not."

"You are. We should get a healer out here before Saturday. Burn some sage. Realign a few things." He tapped his own jaw. "The jaw is where we keep what we won't say."

"I'll take that as a threat."

"We’ve been let down before," my mother said darkly. "The Zoom man. We don't say his name."

"We don't," my father agreed, with real feeling.

And that, I thought, is going to be the tone for the week.

Seven days of my parents performing an enlightenment they purchased at retail. An event planner I hadn't met running the entire production. Steven documenting every hour of it for million s of strangers online. And me in the middle, holding the entire apparatus together with the jaw my father had just correctly diagnosed, marrying a man I don’t love in a meadow I refuse to look at.

The mature choice, I say in my head. I’ve said it in my head a great many times.