“I like brave people. That’s why I like Annie so much. I’m afraid of everything. I’ve always been afraid of everything. I don’t feel anything properly,” he said. “Or if I do feel it, I feel it at the wrong time.”

Ruth was still holding on to him. Her hatred for Nora had dissipated. “You need to go to her today, right now, and you need to tell her you’re not going to marry her.” He finally turned to look at her directly. “You need to do that right now. For her sake. Do you understand?”

“She’s like my family.”

This hurt Ruth: She felt guilty for how long it had taken her to open up to this boy, this life, for how she had treated him. In part she was responsible for how much he needed the love of others. “You’ve just got to be honest. You won’t lose her. You need to tell her now.”

“And by now, you mean…?”

“I mean now.”

He got up and ran after Nora.

Ruth waited for him on the porch. He returned more than an hour later and sat down beside her again.

He drew in and released a deep breath. “Well, that was pleasant.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Whoopsy-daisy, anyone can make a mistake,’ and we had a good laugh about it.” His hands were trembling.

“Raj, you can’t give everyone what they want from you. You need to decide what you want.”

“What if I want to give everyone what they want from me?”

“Then there’s no one here.” She poked him gently on his chest. “There’s no you.”

The shadow of a cloud swallowed the barn and eased toward them. “Sounds perfect,” he said.

Annie felt absurd in her wedding gown, like a child playing dress-up, but the whole town was here in the church hall. Between the tables, children unspooled as she once had, dizzy with sly sips of beer, dervishing on the dance floor. Did they feel it as a reprieve? Did they notice Karl Kroger slap his wife’s hand away as she tried to stop him from refilling his glass? In all the weddings she had been to as a child, Annie wondered how many of those brides had spent their mornings like her, retching.

At the head table, her mom and dad sat to her right, Lew, her husband—husband—to her left with his dad, and at the end, Raj, who was engaged to Nora and would leave with her for Boston in a week. Alvin’s dad—how strange to be married by him—was making the rounds of the tables, kneeling down beside the old ladies and patting their frail liver-spotted hands, while his wife sat grim as a zombie. Judy hadn’t spoken one word since she had collapsed to the floor in the hospital. If anyone even approached her she would just stare at them hatefully. Bizarrely, though, she continued to do everything she had done before—going to church and to school board meetings—though she remained silent and baneful throughout.