What struck Rich, as his mom picked up half of a croissant and offered it to the baby, was the calm. No one else spoke. The disappointment of being marooned here without half the wedding party? His aunt Irene put her feet up on the table and leaned her head back and closed her eyes, like a girl on vacation who was learning to savor it; she wondered if the airline lost money when weather interfered; nobody knew. Nobody cared that the husbands weren’t coming. The “air” being breathed here was the air of relief—not giddy or vindictive relief, but it was awful, all the same. About two hundred years of accumulated married bliss among Rich’s mom and four sisters, his cousins, fell away like a scab with no sign of injury beneath it. They were discussing the impact of Oprah. It was sickening.

Marriage sucked, he thought. You get married for what, again? You get married because you give up.

His mom went around the driveway on Martina’s bicycle, pedaled back and said, “How about for lunch we have a picnic?”

Fuck all of you, Rich thought. I’m not gonna be like this.

There was his mother, making the best of it, getting ready to go back to her miserable marriage. Watching public television when things got hairy, hunchback, facelift, elastic-waist jeans, yessing Rich’s blowhard dad, doing her needlepoint, unable to order her own meal in a restaurant, trying to sound brightly engaged in her nonspeaking role in the community theater’s The Music Man, bragging about their view from the living room back home. There was his father, furious, as usual, but glad to be off the hook, driving back home from the airport to make tomatoes stuffed with rice, so excited he wouldn’t have to chance his rectum to foreign foods—he had more interest in his colon than he did in his family; he was more excited for his Winstar cruise than for the wedding, because on the cruise he could flatulate in public, tell his boring stories about the road-crew buddies he’d done community service with after almost going to jail for tax fraud.

Fuck them both, Rich thought.

Emile had been reading the newspaper and tried to lighten the mood and said, “Ha-ha! Rhee-sharrh, we have ze ladies alone. God is a Frenchman. He make you a special wedding!”

Rich went over and looked at a pile of inner tubes Martina rented through an outdoor-adventure company in town. She’d arranged a tubing excursion on the Loire. She had a plug-in twelve-volt air compressor, and every time Rich snapped the valve onto the nipple it popped off. Emile came and stood over him as if he were Rich’s father and Rich was his son:

“Pull the metal. You fuck it up.”

“Oh, thank you, fuck you. Like you could do it any better.”

“Yeah, but you still fuck it up.”