I should have introduced Hall as my personal assistant. Damn my love affair with engagement rings and attention!

“So helpful and considerate, too,” Marilou’s now telling me. “He carried my suitcases to my room for me.”

Felix glowers at the table, profile turned away from Dad, who he’s accurately guessed is mentally berating him for not carrying his wife’s suitcases to their room himself. Mom accidentally knocks him in the cheek with her elbow while fanning her face with one hand.

“So sorry, dear.” She kisses his boo-boo, and Felix allows himself one swift glance at me. My smirk prompts him to kick me under the table. I am briefly transported back to childhood vacations, my siblings and I crammed into the back of a van together, pinching each other as hard as we could and suppressing all our yells so we wouldn’t get into trouble.

To Marilou, I say, “Hall is . . . great.” It’s a weak reply.

“How did he propose? I love proposal stories.” She spins her engagement ring around her finger, reminding us all that Felix proposed to her at a small award ceremony televised only on local programming, high off the adrenaline of the evening. He didn’t even win. It was, as Grandma decreed, abominably gauche.

Felix’s glower has taken on a life of its own.

“He proposed spontaneously, on an ordinary day. He didn’t even have a ring ready.” I don’t know why I say this, but it sounds right.

Marilou nods. “Love it.”

I sit up straight, a flicker of pride running through me. “There I was, listening to Mariah Carey on the record player”—she brightens, as she’s the one who gave me Mariah’s albums—“and he came into the room, and I said, Hey, there, and it just happened. It’s like he dropped out of the sky one day, being everything I needed.”

“Do you have a dress picked out? A date? I love wedding dresses. Say Yes to the Dress is my favorite show.”

She and Felix got married in Vegas, at his urging. He’d already done the big wedding multiple times, so by the time wife number four came along he thought big weddings might be a curse, dooming them to fail. If they went as low-key as possible, purposefully making choices that ran opposite to his previous ones, they’d last forever. Marilou, who was getting married for the first time, wore jeans and a tank top. I look at my brother, who is trying to change the subject to his movie. No one listens. Three different conversations are currently taking place in the kitchen, so he can either participate in (1) wedding talk, which doesn’t cast him in the most flattering light, or (2) a conversation about hunting quail, which he’s actively avoiding because he once shot Grandpa in the ass while hunting together, and which he’s hoping no one will bring up, or (3) a heated debate about Minecraft between Octavian and Frangipane.

He shifts toward Octavian and Frangipane. “What are we talking about? Enter the Dragon?”