As the crowd murmured the toast, there was a squeal followed by a loud crash from the back. The table at which Frank and his girl were sitting had been tipped over. Frank was circling a bottle of beer above his head in mockery of the toast.

The atmosphere was poisoned, and for a second Annie felt like telling everyone to go home. But another glass rang with a tapping knife, and Raj stood up.

The room settled as he began. “Annie was the first person I met when I got to Pisgah. She was convinced, I later found out, that I was a young Indian maharaja who’d been kidnapped. Was she going to save me? Well…no. She was going to get Frank to save me. This tells you a great deal about Annie: her amazing imagination, her desire to help, and her inclination to delegate the actual hard and dangerous work to others.”

A few people laughed.

“In our first meeting I knew it, as I know it now: This girl is in charge. She scolded me for not being able to climb trees as well as she could; convinced me there were certain Australian spiders that wore eyeglasses. She was the only one who ever survived our childhood battles, all of which were conceived and orchestrated by her. If Annie wasn’t with us—Nora, Alv, Lew, and me—we’d be at a complete loss. Even if she were gone for just a day, we’d sit around like nostalgic old people, remembering her. And it didn’t escape me that there was one among us who was always treated a little differently. Not that Lew got to survive our childhood games, but I noticed that while I would die face down in a muddy ditch, Lew would always breathe his last in Annie’s arms. It soon became clear to Nora, Alv, and me that almost all our games culminated one way or another in Lew falling into Annie’s arms. In her imagination, while the three of us were treacherous varmints, dispatched with a flick of her blade, Lew was a noble and courageous adversary, who would succumb to her—of course—only after a monumental battle, at the end of which he would…fall into her arms, be held tight, praised, and kissed honorably upon his pale cheek.

“So now the game continues and we treacherous varmints—dear Alvin from his place, Nora and me from ours—will continue to watch their struggle. They’ve fallen into each other’s arms for good. As in those childhood games, there is always death in life. We mourn as we celebrate; and today we celebrate as we mourn some other Annie and some other Lewis, who lived among us not an hour ago. In their place, here, this Annie and Lewis, whom we shall need to get to know again—as a man and a woman, a husband and a wife, and, if they are so blessed, as a mother and a father.