“Honestly, I’m ready for a nap,” Patricia says to Phoebe.

In the Great Hall, the wedding people are all lined up in order of importance, as decided by Nancy, the events planner for the Preservation Society. First there is Gary’s cousin Roy, the officiant for the wedding, likely the only family event at which he has been deemed the least important. Then the groom’s parents. The flower girl, the ring bearer. The bridesmaids. The maid of honor. The mother of the bride and her grandmother. And, then, of course, the bride.

“Do not touch the walls. Do not touch the windows,” Nancy says. “Do not touch anything here but your spouse! I find that’s generally a good rule for life, and also the Breakers.”

Everyone laughs.

“I’ll be back,” Nancy says. “And when I come back, be ready.”

As soon as she leaves, people slacken. Marla walks over to introduce her son, Oliver, to Phoebe, because Phoebe is a professor of literature. Oliver gets excited about this in a way a twelve-year-old child normally does not.

“I’ve read all the Percy Jackson books,” Oliver says. “My favorite by far is The Titan’s Curse. Have you ever read it?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t,” Phoebe says.

Oliver looks disappointed but then runs off with Juice to see who can get closest to the walls without touching them.

Bootsie starts pointing out the things she finds most objectionable about the Breakers to Lila and Patricia, while Phoebe gets a phone call from her husband. She puts her phone on silent. She doesn’t want to hear his voice tonight. Not here, in this Great Hall, which feels more like a courtyard. Not now, not tonight. Phoebe is already confused enough. She drops the phone back in her purse, and Marla pulls out hers.

“I sent my last sext to Robert before he got on the plane this morning,” Marla whispers to Phoebe. “He hasn’t responded since, and now I’m worried it’s weird.”

“Why would it be weird? Isn’t he right there?” Phoebe asks, looking at a tall, thin man who has walked over to get the kids away from the walls.

“Yeah, that’s why it’s weird. I told him that my tiny little pussy is wet and waiting for him, and then we just greet each other at the Breakers with dry kisses on the cheek,” Marla says. “I mean, shouldn’t we be beyond this stage now? We’ve been married for fifteen years.”

“Maybe it’s the right place to be,” Phoebe says. “If you’re starting over, you’re starting over.”

Then Nancy returns and says, “Go, go, go!” as if they are kids entering a soccer field for the big game. When Phoebe walks past Nancy and through the door, she waits for a slap on the ass that never comes.

Outside, the sun is bright. She takes slow steps toward the pergola. She pauses in front of it, in front of Gary. She looks at Gary’s face, but the sun is too bright behind him. She keeps her eyes low, focused on Jim’s shiny shoes. She wonders if they were the same ones he wore to Wendy’s funeral.

Phoebe walks to the left, completes the line of women that will stand at Lila’s side. From there, she watches Lila walk slowly up the aisle in her white reception dress. Lila beams at Gary so brightly, it feels like the moment in the barbershop is long forgotten. It feels like all of the moments that came before this one are irrelevant. This is what the wedding ritual does to Phoebe—even just the rehearsing of it: Nothing can compete.

“Okay, then we’ll cut the music and you stand here and look deeply into each other’s eyes,” Nancy says, and she turns to Roy. “Then you will say whatever meaningful thing it is you are going to say.”

“And then we’ll be married and hooray,” Lila says.

They kiss, just for good measure.

It is over, and they walk out, one by one, each woman pairing up with a groomsman. Phoebe links arms with Jim. His arm feels good in hers. It is solid, the arm of a man who probably balances well on a ridgeline.

Maybe tonight I’ll sleep with Jim, Phoebe thinks.

She’s surprised by the thought. Jim feels more like a brother to her. But maybe they both need to redirect their desire. Have a night with each other. She’s never had sex with a younger man before. Something about spending too much time around students. Their youth was appalling to her. How much they didn’t know. How little they thought about the Battle of the Bulge.

But Jim is a good man. An engineer. He is building a seaplane.

“You ever finish that speech?” Phoebe asks him as they turn the corner back into the Great Hall where they started.

“I did, actually,” Jim says, and he sounds proud.

BACK AT THE hotel, the patio has been transformed into a magical fairy-tale forest for the rehearsal dinner. Oak farmhouse tables, set up in rows, torches lining the border of the stone floor. White roses hanging from the balconies above. And right in the middle of it all stand Lila and Gary, staring at the giant painting of Patricia naked.

“Who brought this painting here?” Lila asks when Phoebe and Jim join them. “I did not ask for this to be brought here.”

“It was your mother’s idea,” Gary says. “She wanted to surprise you. She knows how much it means to us.”

“Right,” Lila says, and nods slowly. “But there are children here.”

“Technically only two,” Jim says.

“Juice has seen this painting a million times,” Gary says, confused.

“And Oliver seems … advanced,” Phoebe says.

Phoebe looks at the painting of Patricia for the first time. There stands the cubist abstraction of a naked mother in the bright sun of a hyperrealistic garden. If the mother didn’t look so fragmented, or if the garden didn’t look so dead, it wouldn’t work. But it does. It’s beautiful. And sad. Beautiful because it’s sad or sad because it’s beautiful.

“I’ll grab us a drink,” Gary says to Lila.

When he walks away, Lila says, “I just don’t understand why my mother must make even my wedding about her naked body.”

Jim walks closer to the painting as if he might figure it out.

“Please do not get so close to my mother, Jim,” Lila says.

He points to the book that Withers painted in Patricia’s hand.

“Is the title of this book really No One Gardens Alone?” he asks.

“Wait, seriously?” Lila asks. She bursts out laughing. She looks closer at the painting. “I bought my mother that book for her birthday. I thought she might like, need a hobby or something.”

Jim looks at her. “See? In that way, this painting actually is all about you.”

“From one bullshitter to the next, that is some serious bullshit,” Lila says.

He laughs.

“But thanks for trying,” Lila says.

She stares at Jim tenderly, and Phoebe looks away as if she is witnessing a private moment she shouldn’t. Something about the exchange, the meeting of their eyes. An uncanny moment when the universe is presenting the right order of things, or at least another possible order of things. If Lila’s father had chosen a different doctor. If Jim hadn’t brought Gary to the gallery that day.

But in this universe, she watches the two of them walk away from each other. Lila headed for her drink at the bar, Jim looping arms with Gary’s mother. She wonders what will become of Jim, and worries that losing Lila might set him back another decade. Imagines he might become a man who finds it easier to build a seaplane before he builds a family. The kind of man who lives alone for so long, he ends up treating his own house like a country, carrying everything he needs as he walks the perimeter, his loud laugh the anthem the neighbors hear from afar. But maybe one day, he’ll finally scrub the oil off his hands for the last time and think, Where did everybody go?

And Lila—where will she be by then? Ten years into marriage with Gary. Perhaps with two children. Already on her second sleeping pill in the upstairs bedroom. Starting to understand why her mother day drinks.

“SO, WHAT DID it actually feel like to be a sniper?” Phoebe asks Roy by the appetizer table. Maybe she’ll go for Roy instead, she thinks. Roy is the only man here seemingly not in love with someone else. And he is big, tall, like some action hero who is too large for every suit in the known world.

“It was phenomenal,” Roy says.