“Can’t you ask him not to drink too much that day?” her mother asked.

“No,” Sudha said, pushing back her chair and standing up. She had been fiddling all this time with her teaspoon, and she flung it now, ineffectually, on the carpeted floor of the dining room, where it fell without sound. “I can’t talk to him anymore. I can’t fix him. I can’t keep fixing what’s wrong with this family,” she said, and like her brother only a little while earlier, she stormed out of the room.

During the reception Rahul made a toast. It was a tribute to Sudha and Roger, but Sudha held her breath as he spoke, wanting him only to sit down. He was without Elena. The day after walking out with her he’d returned abject, alone. Sudha wondered if Elena had broken up with him, but she didn’t ask. She wondered if Rahul would not attend the reception, but he was at the restaurant an hour early, maintaining his rightful place in the family, greeting people as they arrived, showing them to the sign-in book. They were almost all friends of Sudha’s parents, almost all Bengali. No one from Roger’s side had come.

The toast went on, the words becoming slurred. Before the reception, her father had spoken with the bartender, paying him extra to monitor Rahul’s drinks; Sudha did not have the heart to tell her father that Rahul was beyond such measures, that alcohol dwelled in his pockets where most men’s wallets were, that the two glasses of champagne he’d had openly were just for show. Rahul began telling a story about Sudha’s childhood, dredging up an anecdote about going on a vacation long ago in Bar Harbor, Sudha needing to use the bathroom and there not being a gas station for miles. Then their father got up, stood next to Rahul, and whispered something in his ear, motioning for him to sit down.

“Excuse me, I’m not finished.” People laughed, not realizing Rahul had not meant to be funny, that it wasn’t some sort of comic routine. The microphone made a screeching sound.

Their father took him by the elbow then, and Rahul flinched, giving a shove. “You—don’t—touch me,” Rahul hissed, the words amplified by the microphone.

One of Sudha’s parents’ friends got up to make another toast, but Sudha didn’t hear it. She was aware of guests talking among themselves in front of their plates of pink tandoori and her brother heading toward the bar. When she got up to look for him, he was no longer there, his car missing from the parking lot. She alerted her parents, prepared herself for another call from the police. But no one was in the position to search for him in the middle of the reception, and without him there, perversely, her parents began to relax. Only Sudha couldn’t relax. Roger, who had had a little too much champagne himself, told her not to worry. “He’s been going through a rough time,” he observed dispassionately as he led her on the dance floor. “He’s young.”