Dad thinks an e-invite is just as good as paper, but Jesse wanted a real invitation for every guest at their wedding. He ordered them at a stationery store, and they were delivered in a heavy square box. Inside, everything fit together like a puzzle: a stack of folded invitations, a lot of big envelopes, and these little square cards that Jesse said we would put inside the invitations, so that people could send them back to us, saying whether or not they could come. They were called RSVP cards, and there were even little envelopes for them.

The invitation list had almost seventy people on it. (Dad said the garden at Beatrice could fit about seventy before everyone was officially squashed.) Mom and Sheila were first on the list, and Mom and Dad’s college friend Melissa (mostly Mom’s friend now), and Lizette and her grandmother, and Angus and (unfortunately) his parents, along with a lot of other Dad-and-Jesse friends and restaurant people. Jesse and Sheila’s parents died a long time ago, just like Dad’s. But our Minnesota family was coming and staying in a hotel. Dad had already made their reservation and confirmed that room service served hard-boiled eggs for Uncle Frank.

Sheila bought a calligraphy pen and addressed all the envelopes herself. Then one night after dinner we scrubbed the kitchen table, dried it carefully, and made an assembly line. It was the four of us—Dad, Jesse, me, and Sheila—and we called Sonia on Skype so that she could be there, too. Jesse made a stack of books at one end of the table and balanced his laptop on it so that Sonia’s head was almost exactly as high as mine. Sonia was excited, and she even got some pieces of paper and pretended to stuff them into an envelope a few times, so it was like she was there helping us. It was pretty funny until she said, “Look, Daddy—this one’s for Uncle Mission,” and Jesse looked down and didn’t say anything.

“Daddy!” Sonia said, still smiling. She thought he hadn’t heard her. Her head was there, but her body was in California. If she’d been in the room, she would have known right away that Jesse had heard her the first time.

It was Sheila who talked finally. “Honey, you know Uncle Mission isn’t coming to the wedding, right?”

“Why not?”

Sheila looked at Jesse, who was still staring at the table.

Sheila said, “Uncle Mission doesn’t want to be part of your dad’s life anymore.”

Then Jesse talked. “Stop it, Sheel. He never said that.”

I had never seen Sheila look furious before. “Jesse. He disappeared on you. How would you like me to say it?”

Jesse looked…afraid. I think he was afraid because Sonia was hearing what Sheila said.

“Maybe I should send him an invitation,” Sonia said. “He’ll come if I send it.”