“We’ll all be having a nice time sitting at the beach or something, and out of nowhere, Jim will just be like, Remember when Wendy tried to make a kite out of beer cans?”

“Is that possible?”

“Apparently, it didn’t fly,” Lila says. “And fine, I get it. In his eyes, I’m his dead sister’s replacement and he always wants me to remember that. But this is my wedding week. And I can’t stop having this horrible feeling that somehow Jim is going to ruin it. I mean, if you don’t beat him to it.”

Then Lila scans the reception with the binoculars again like she’s looking for Jim. When she finds him, she narrows her eyes with alarm.

“Oh my God, is Jim seriously hitting on my mother?”

She hands the binoculars to Phoebe.

“Which one is your mother?” Phoebe asks.

“The one who looks like she’s just about to go on Dancing with the Stars.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“That’s actually very specific,” Lila says. But then she points to a woman in a yellow dress.

Even with the binoculars, Phoebe can’t see much beyond a man and a woman talking with drinks in their hands. Every so often, Jim leans in, puts his hand on her mother’s shoulder. But it doesn’t look especially flirtatious. More familial.

“They look like they’re just, you know, talking,” Phoebe says.

“Oh, there is no just talking with my mother,” Lila says. “With her, it’s like always this intense spewing of information, like here is the last book on Gaudi that I just read and now I am going to tell you all about it verbatim. And my father used to just sit there and take it for thirty years, until he finally exploded and told us that he hated modern art. He actually confessed that to us on his deathbed. Isn’t that awful?”

“Wait, what?” Phoebe asks. “Your father confessed on his deathbed that he didn’t like modern art?”

“That’s right,” Lila says. “My father called from the hospital and asked to be put on speaker, and we were all gathered around, because we never knew which call was going to be his last, and he was like, My darlings, every man must come to terms with his true nature at the end of his life, and it is time I do the same, and my mother was like, Are you sure that’s a good idea, Henry? And my father was just like, I have always despised modern art, particularly the Cubists and everything that followed.”

Her father blamed Picasso, especially, for bringing dignity to the whole movement away from painting as representation.

“And maybe in some families this wouldn’t seem like a big confession, but my parents’ marriage had basically been built on the fact that they were these great, benevolent supporters of contemporary art,” Lila says. “My father bought my mother her first painting.”

Buying art together was how they fell in love. They made a name for themselves building one of the country’s most important collections of contemporary artists. They gave a five-hundred-thousand-dollar grant to the NEA each year. All of this helped make sense of the millions her father made in waste management. Helped give meaning to the landfills of trash her father owned across the country.

“So to find out that he only did all this just to impress my mother in the beginning,” Lila says. “Insert a montage of monologues from my mother about how her mother was right, how she never should have married a much older man who was literally in the business of trash, and how dare that man call anything a waste, let alone Cubism, and she knows now she really should have married her cousin’s cousin Gregory Lancaster like her mother had suggested, because the joke’s on her. Gregory is still alive.”

Phoebe looks through the binoculars and watches Jim walk away. She waits to see if anything comes over Lila’s mother’s face. She wonders if it’s hard to be at this wedding alone after her husband’s death. Is she worried about who she is going to talk to next? How long she’ll have to stand there alone?

“And so now my mother is convinced that I’m making a mistake marrying Gary, just like her,” Lila says.

“How do you know?”

“She tells me! When she’s really loaded at two in the afternoon, she just says these things. She’s like, Lila, you don’t have to get married just because your father’s dying wish was to see you get married. What does it matter? He’s already dead! And then she goes off about how I might want to think twice about marrying an older man in waste management like she did.”

“I thought Gary was a doctor?”

“My father owned landfills. Gary is a gastroenterologist. Totally different jobs, but my mother is just like, Like I said, they’re both in waste management. Two men, on a mission to help the country deal with their shit.”

Lila is quiet for a moment, like she is considering something deeply, perhaps the entire trajectory of her life.

“Can you imagine having a mother who talks to you like that?”

“My mother is dead,” Phoebe says.

“Oh. Well, you’re lucky then. My mother, she just monologues,” Lila says, as if she were not doing the same exact thing right now. “Which is absolutely why she is not getting a speech at this wedding. I kept telling her, Mom, the mother of the bride doesn’t even get a speech, and she was like, Yes, and why do we think that is, Lila? Why do you think the men have always wanted the mother of the bride to be silent?”

The bride takes another sip.

“And I’m like, It’s not about men! It’s about you! Why would I trust you with a speech? You’re just going to get loaded and stand up there and talk about how Gary is too old for me or something!”

Phoebe wonders how long Lila could go on without a response. Again, she wonders if this is the difference between growing up with and without a mother. Having a mother helps you believe that everybody wants to hear every little thing you think. Having a mother helps you speak without thinking. It allows you to trust in your most awful self, to yell and scream and cry, knowing that your mother will still love you by the end of it. In her teens, Phoebe was regularly astonished by how awful her friends were to their mothers, and the mothers just took it, because the mothers knew that sometimes they were awful, too. The mothers had made their own mistakes.

But Phoebe’s mother sat high up on the fireplace mantel, in a gilded frame, like a martyred saint. Under her gaze, Phoebe was careful never to make any mistakes. Phoebe was quiet and obedient, never talking too fast or too loudly, because she never wanted to be a burden to her father. She had felt this way in her marriage, too—careful never to cry too hard or tell meandering stories at dinner. Careful always to wear nice pajamas to bed. Careful never to lose control. Even at the end, when she learned about the affair, she stayed so calm that her husband was confused. “You’re being so nice about this,” Matt said.

But Lila talks without end, without clear transitions from topic to topic, assuming that Phoebe, a total stranger who has already announced multiple times that she wants to die, is interested in hearing every detail about her personal life. Phoebe can’t tell if it’s the most appalling or most impressive display she’s ever witnessed.

Either way, Phoebe is interested.

“How much older than you is Gary?” Phoebe asks.

“Only eleven and a half years,” the bride says. “He’s forty, but you can barely tell.”

“Oh,” Phoebe says, genuinely not impressed. “That’s not bad. I’ve seen much worse.”

“Like what?” The bride looks hopeful.

“Like this seventy-five-year-old historian at my university had an affair with the twenty-six-year-old admin.”

“Jesus. That’s just weird.”

“Especially since she wasn’t even trying to get her PhD,” Phoebe says. It feels good to talk about her old life so casually like that. As if it were all just funny subject material to share in conversation with Lila. “I mean, we could never figure out why she was doing it exactly. Like what would this admin with no aspirations in higher ed gain from dating a married geriatric academic?”

“Maybe she was in love,” the bride says. “Not everything is a pathology, you know. I was like, Mom, not everything is about Dad dying! I didn’t even know Dad was dying when I met Gary. Gary just randomly came to our art gallery looking for some paintings to fill up his new house, and then two days later, I took my dad to his GI because we were expecting bad news, and I was shocked to see that Gary was the doctor. I mean, truly a wild coincidence. Gary and I both knew it had to mean something.”

But her mother was not convinced.

“My mother is like, We all knew on some level that your father was going to die. And I’m like, Well yeah, I’ve always known that someday my father will die. But maybe, just maybe, it’s possible that Gary and I love each other? I mean, why does everything have to be about my father one day dying? And my mother is like, I didn’t make the rules, sweetheart. Take it up with Freud.”

The bride sighs.

“We should have just gotten married right after he proposed,” Lila says. “My father was actually doing really well then, responding to the treatments the way Gary said he would. But we had just gone into lockdown, and so we kept postponing the wedding, thinking the lockdown would end at any moment. And then my dad got so much worse and after he was hospitalized, it didn’t feel right to celebrate anything. I mean, he hardly made any sense at the end. He was so high on morphine, it became unbearable to take his phone calls. We’d put him on speaker and be like, Hi, Dad, but then there would be nothing but this long dramatic pause until finally, he was like … Herbbbbballll Essences!”

Phoebe is confused. “Herbal Essences?”

“I don’t know,” the bride says. “That’s what he said. It made no sense. It was just … silence … and then Herbbballlllll Essences! And I was like, Okay, Dad. What about Herbal Essences? But he hung up. And then he died. And those were literally my father’s last words to me.”

Phoebe looks at Lila and Lila looks at Phoebe. The sadness of the story is so stark, her voice so monotone when she delivered it, they erupt into a laughter so intense it surprises Phoebe. Every time they are about to calm down, the bride says, “Herrbbbballl Essences!” and Phoebe starts laughing all over again. It makes her feel high.