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Harold and Rhoda. Blaine and Steven. Lance. Benny at the end with the iPad face-down, which I had learned to read as his version of taking off a wristwatch. Zephyr in cream linen at Rhoda's right hand, where he had apparently been assigned in perpetuity.

Me in the middle. Exactly where I'd been told I would sit.

He'd been right about that. Blaine called it in his mother's kitchen with a corkscrew in his hand on the day I arrived, and I spent the whole week being annoyed about how right he'd been. I sat down in my assigned place, looked down the table, and thought:

He put me where I can see him.

Blaine was in dark green. No tie. Collar open.

I'm going to move past that quickly, because there's ground to cover and I'd like to retain some dignity. But I want the record to show that my ex-husband went to his own rehearsal dinner with his collar open, and that he has not appeared at a formal event with his collar open since the last year we were married, and that he knew exactly what he was doing, and that I could not prove one word of it.

Harold stood up before the salads.

That was the first thing that went wrong, and nobody saw it coming, because Harold Cauthorne has been giving the same toast on that property since I met him. The toast is about water. It's charming, it runs slightly long, and it ends with everybody raising a glass to the land.

He got a little way in. Then he stopped.

Harold stood there with his glass up and everyone waiting, and I watched a man who has spent his entire adult life arranging not to be touched by anything get touched by something.

"I want to say something else," he said. "If that's all right."

"Harold, you don't have to—"

"No. I must. I know it isn't the — I know." He put the glass down. Kept hold of it. "Esteban Delgado has worked on this land longer than my son has been a lawyer, and he isn't here tonight. That's because he was hurt on my property."

Nobody moved.

"And what I've worked out," Harold said, "is that I’ve spent a very long time calling that man family, and I have never once asked him what he'd want. I gave him a truck he didn't choose and a schedule he didn't set, and a word — family — that costs me nothing to say and means he cannot tell me no."

Steven's eyes were fixed on his plate.

Down the table Blaine had set his fork down and was looking at his father with an expression I have never seen on him, and I’ve seen most of them.

"So I'm going to change some things," Harold said. "I'm going to ask him what he wants, which I understand is the entire point, and which has taken me an embarrassingly long time." He picked the glass up properly. "Anyway. That isn't a toast. Sorry, Benny."

"It was better than a toast." Benny smiled.

"To Sol," Harold said. "Who is the only person in this family who has ever told me the truth about myself, and who has been doing it since he was a small boy.”

Blaine Cauthorne wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist and did not try to hide it.

I would like to tell you I felt something noble about that.

What I actually felt was: I did that. Partly. I'm partly the reason Harold stood up.

And then, immediately underneath it: No. You told that man a lie to make him feel better so that you wouldn't have to feel worse. Harold got here on his own.

Both of those went through me while I held a glass up and smiled at a family that loves me.

* * *

Steven got up after the main course, and I want to be fair about it, because he was good.

Not slick, but noticeably nervous. He had index cards and didn't look at them. He kept losing his place and finding it again, and he talked about the first time he saw Blaine across a room and how he'd assumed a man like that would never look twice at a man like him. How he had been wrong, and how some mornings he still couldn't believe his good fortune.

"I know I'm a lot to take," he said. "I know I'm — like — a lot."

Somebody laughed.