DAN, THE RICH guy, came toward me. I thought he wanted to shake hands. He simply pointed. “I can’t believe you’re here.” Eyes narrowing, he moved away. Like many of the men in the wedding party, he wore a tuxedo that was a kind of custom job. Everyone else ignored me. We were waiting. Bob stood in his asinine four-button European tux with his hair greased back, shredding the lid of a coffee cup with his teeth. Niles and Wayne were staying in a rented house on the other side of the island, and they were late.

“Why do all my friends hate me?” Bob said. This was a last vestige of his powerful charm, these moments of lucidity. “And people say I’m selfish.”

They arrived and we pinned our flowers on and pictures were taken as we cooked in the sun in our tuxes. I overheard Bob saying that the senator was here and Madeleine Albright had arrived last night with Justice Ginsburg and that certain parts of the lawn would be secured for a landing area by Secret Service in case the weather held. But the predicted weather—terrible fog by three o’clock, scaled back from rain—would make a helicopter visit impossible. Bob sounded relieved—he was selling us on the fog, embracing the weather so something larger than himself could take the fall. “It comes in off the ocean, it looks just like smoke.” Later he stood in the kitchen while I drank some ice water. “The island is transformed,” he told Niles, who nodded stupidly. “All you hear is the foghorn blowing.”

Bob left to change his sweat-stained shirt. Niloo told me he’d been up since five, calling everybody he knew connected to Gore. “I told him he’d better relax and forget about this business or he’d miss his whole day. He’d miss everything for what?” Her eyebrows bore down heavily and crossed. She had beautiful cinnamon-colored skin. Her eye shadow was bluish silver, and her mouth was dark cranberry red. “He just gets nuts!” I could see her thinking; the years lay before her and she saw the loneliness and wasted effort in a flash and erased it all, and I saw her chest fall. She looked worried. I said, “I’m sure he knows you’re right.” Maybe I was seeing things, but there appeared to be a tiny pink mark in the center of her forehead, a flushed circle of irritated skin, with a crescent-shaped indentation inside it. Her mother came up and asked if she was ready, and they looked at each other, all perturbed. “Well,” Niloo said. It might’ve been a scar from before.