Half Title

Dedication

IN MEMORY OF DANIEL HYATT, BARMAN EXTRAORDINAIRE

By the Same Author

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NOVELS:

All the Dirty Parts

We Are Pirates

Adverbs

The Basic Eight

Watch Your Mouth

Why We Broke Up

NOT NOVELS:

Girls Standing on Lawns

Hurry Up and Wait

Weather, Weather

AS LEMONY SNICKET:

[list available on request]

Title Page

Part One

Part One

Chapter One

CHAPTER 1

Dearly beloved, the vicar is practicing his ceremony. His name is Reynard, tall and bent-thin like a straw in a drink, wearing a borderline-sloppy linen suit, and a hat for the sun across his ageless face, and is not a vicar. Lil, the woman in charge, can usually smell this kind of thing on people, but she is bent over the tray of enchiladas, her elaborate and expensive necklace nearly trailing in the sauce. All the food for the wedding is Mexican, although the bride and groom are not Mexican at all, and everything looks delicious. There is a bowl of pinto beans with a careful spiral of sour cream in the middle, for instance, and cilantro scattered on top, in a real pattern. The food isn’t what Lil is worried about.

If this is a story about two marriages, then one of them begins here. The bride is Rachel, who is marrying a man named Ben Nickels, very kind and not skinny. Rachel Nickels might not be an ideal new name, a little garbly with the half rhyme, but her maiden name is worse. The wedding is at Bottle Grove, a small forest in San Francisco donated by a wealthy patron for the public good before you were born, back when people did such things. There are such patches all over the city, preserved green forever on maps, Wood Hill, Tank Grove, Kite Lake, Stern Forest. This neighborhood is woodsy, and these are the woods, right where an ugly wide avenue meets a sleepier boulevard, at a corner governed by the forbidding but harmless stare of an old Masonic temple. You might miss the snaky sneakaway, a paved road that winds down to an outdoor amphitheater, terrifying at night, where summer concerts go on. Away from that is a field and a small clubhouse where you can get married.