After my shower, when I was getting dressed, Molly’s bra watched me and I stared back at it. The trail groomer’s humdingers were even bigger than Nora’s, I was imagining. The bedroom windows were open, and I could hear the zither-meister warming up—just the first few chords of “The Third Man Theme,” as if Harry Lime were alive and lurking under the wedding tent in my grandmother’s garden.

Unquestionably, a mood of intrigue and melancholy comes across in “The Harry Lime Theme” on a zither; yet it was an unusually tranquil moment in the midst of my mother’s wedding weekend. At that moment, alone with the night groomer’s captivating bra, I was thinking that the lion’s share of the drama was surely over. At fourteen, I hadn’t learned that the things you imagine when you’re alone with a bra can deceive you.

18. WHAT THE STONE SPARROWS SAW

Certain families have an aura of arrival. I don’t mean an annoying punctuality—the opposite of the haplessness of always being late. Our Brewster family’s aura of arrival was borne of anxiety, bordering on dread. We sensed that something bad was about to happen. We had forebodings of doom—we could intuit when the doom was due to arrive—but we never knew who or what was doomed.

The snowshoer and I had talked about the terms of his adopting me. I could become Adam Barlow or remain Adam Brewster. “If you want to be a writer, Adam, I don’t recommend becoming a Barlow,” Elliot said; he really held his parents’ genre against them.

My mom was thirty-four on her wedding day. “I’ve been Rachel Brewster too long to become Rachel anybody else,” she’d told me and the snowshoer.

Naturally, Nora reported to us concerning the name business. “In my mother’s and Aunt Martha’s eyes, your being a Barlow will never legitimize you, Adam,” Nora told me, “and Ray’s becoming a Barlow won’t redeem her from having disgraced herself as an unwed mother.” I could hear in Nora’s reiterations, of course, exactly how Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha must have expressed themselves on this subject; their righteousness was tireless.

All this is fair to say, but the real reason my mom and I were right to remain Brewsters is that you can’t change a family characteristic as easily as you can change your name. Curse or blessing, we Brewsters were stuck with our forebodings of doom. An aura of arrival was our thing.

In my mother’s bedroom, the afternoon of her wedding, Molly’s big bra had distracted me from my sense of foreboding. That nothing went wrong with the marriage ceremony was further misleading. Not even the sound of Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” on a zither forewarned me. Did I imagine Lohengrin had a happy ending?