When Little Ray, beautiful and radiant in white, was escorted down the aisle—looking like a baroness between my broad-shouldered, admiring uncles—Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha glared at her from their front-row seats. Those two did more than suffer our family’s forebodings of doom. In my mom’s case, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha prayed for an unforgiving doom to befall her. There’s no measuring the harshness of the moral comeuppance or just deserts my aunts imagined my mother had coming to her. For Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha, their aura of arrival was entwined with what they wished for.

I saw how those two were looking at their younger sister—on Little Ray’s wedding day, my aunts were wishing her dead. But nothing untoward happened; the ceremony was never interrupted. My own aura of arrival may have been asleep, but even I was half expecting a long-imagined interruption: a stranger—unrecognizable to everyone, except my mother—leaping to his feet and pointing to me. “He’s my son!” the angry man would declare. Then, pointing to the bride, his voice breaking, the stranger would say, “Remember me, Ray? Aspen, the Hotel Jerome, March ’41?”

But no such stranger came forth to stop the marriage ceremony—not even the one my aunts must have been imagining, the one they so ardently wished for. A pretty boy—a screaming young fairy, as my aunts would have labeled him—standing on his chair and showing us his member of the Dick family, as Nora no doubt would have embellished it. This, of course, would have been the snowshoer’s last lover—a jilted soul. Wouldn’t a pretty boy like that have been a surefire wedding stopper? But no such screaming fairy showed up and stood on a chair—alas, leaving my aunts with an undying disappointment and inner sorrow. No detectable disappointment or symptom of sorrow was evident in my jolly uncles, who laughed throughout the ceremony and burst into cheers during the vows.

The croquet ball almost kept the diaper man standing and calm. The sacred orb seemed to soothe him. When the Congo minister asked his “Do you, Rachel…” and his “Do you, Elliot…” there was no hesitation from Little Ray or the snowshoer, and their answers were crystal-clear. Yet I saw something change in the innocent and roaming attention of the principal emeritus. When my mom said, “I do,” the diaper man’s expression darkened. Something cognizant and distrustful crept into the standing child’s face.