They were from Liverpool, and their accents nearly impenetrable. Their spirits were extraordinarily high, even for the present occasion, and so far they’d giggled enthusiastically at everything anybody said, as if prior to taking their seats they’d been informed that the other guests at this table were all professional comedians. Griffin ’s experience of lesbians was largely limited to the academic variety-a grim, angry, humorless lot-so he was unprepared for these girls’ good cheer. They demonstrated that British habit of turning simple, declarative statements into questions and then waiting a beat, as if for a response. They’d known the bride for years and years, hadn’t they? Ever since she’d come to Norwich, to the University of East Anglia, that is, where she hadn’t known a soul, had she? But they’d gotten her sorted quick enough. That first Friday afternoon after class they’d pulled her out of the residence hall by force and hauled her down to their favorite pub for a pint, and then introduced her to all the other good pubs and also their chooms (Their what? Griffin thought. Oh, right, their chums), and when the holidays came round they’d dragged her home to meet their mums and dads, and it had all been ever so much foon, hadn’t it? Still, you could’ve knocked them down with a feather when they got invitations to the wedding, because they hadn’t neither of them ever come over to the States before, had they?
By the time the girls finished, they were holding hands, which Marguerite apparently took for a show of moral support between foreigners, because she asked if either of them was married or engaged. “Booth of us,” one of them replied, giving her partner’s hand a squeeze, “to each oother,” as if to admit that their sexual preference might be a local custom that hadn’t yet made its way across the pond. Apropos of nothing but her own embarrassment at not recognizing them as a couple, Marguerite then remarked she’d always wanted to go to England but never had, the reason being-and here she elbowed Harold-that nobody’d ever been nice enough to take her. “Women,” Harold said, turning again to Griffin. “They just never can give it a rest.”
Marguerite nudged him, noticing he’d already drained most of his champagne. “That’s for the toasts.”
“Complete this sentence and win a prize,” Harold told her. “Give… it… a…”
Having no women to speak for them, the final two-Sunny and a man in a wheelchair-had no alternative but to plead their own cases. The latter had a lopsided smile, if that’s what it was and not a grimace, that bespoke a recent stroke. During the previous introductions he’d stared steadfastly at his cutlery as if he expected the utensils to become dangerously animated. There was a vacant chair, complete with place setting, on either side of him, suggesting that everyone had concluded his condition might be contagious. In a loud, braying voice he announced that he was the groom’s sixth-grade math teacher, which cracked the lesbians up more than anything anybody’d said so far. “Animal House,” Griffin whispered to Joy, who, no surprise, didn’t get the reference. Though she enjoyed movies, even their most iconic moments left no lasting impression on her, and she’d always considered his own ability to quote such scenes verbatim as rather perverse.
Which left Sunny, who managed to say only his name and that he lived in Washington, D.C., before the DJ chose that moment to conduct a sound check of his nearby equipment. Harold swiveled in his chair to watch, a clear indication that he couldn’t care less who Sunny was or what he’d done to be stranded at the misfit table. A loud peal of laughter from the front of the tent attracted the attention of the lesbians, who stood to applaud something, Griffin couldn’t tell what, and the man in the wheelchair resumed staring at his knife and fork. The Griffins, of course, didn’t need to be introduced to Sunny, which left only Marguerite to give him her undivided attention. “Go on,” she said. “I want to hear all about you,” and if Griffin hadn’t already decided to like her, he would have then. But the best man had risen to give the first of the afternoon’s strained comic toasts, and Sunny, ever good-natured, turned his chair around to watch and listen.
By the time they were invited to raise their glasses in a toast to the bride and groom, Harold’s glass was empty. Perhaps to emphasize this fact, after everyone else had drunk to the toast, Sunny rose to his feet, his glass held high, and proposed a toast of his own for table seventeen. “Here stop and spend a social hour in harmless mirth and fun,” he intoned, grinning, for some reason, at Griffin and then Marguerite. “Let friendship reign. Be just and kind and evil speak of none.” After which they all leaned forward to clink glasses, and Griffin found the ting of Harold’s empty flute against all the other full ones particularly rewarding.
“What an odd toast,” Joy whispered. “Do you suppose it’s Korean?”
“I don’t think so,” Griffin said. It felt not only familiar but recently so. He could feel the dim memory spooling toward the front of his brain, but then his cell phone vibrated and it was gone. “Again?” Joy said in disbelief when he showed her who it was.
“I’ll take it outside,” he said, getting to his feet. “Mom, hold on, okay?”
It took him a minute to get out of the tent, and when he put the phone to his ear, he realized that his mother, unaccustomed to being told to wait, had been talking the whole time. “Mom, I haven’t heard a word of this. Is everything all right?”
“Of course everything’s all right.”
“Then-”
“Have you done it yet?”
“Done what?”
“Put your father in the drink.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Scattered his ashes. Laid him to rest.”
“Not yet, no.”
“I think you should put him on the bay side. He was that kind of man, don’t you think? Wordsworth was his favorite poet. ‘Emotion recollected in tranquility’ and all that nonsense, which all boiled down to being afraid of the surf. He hated being tossed about, feeling the power of something greater than himself.”
The music from inside the tent ratcheted up now, and Griffin turned his back (as if that would help) and covered his other ear with his hand (which did help, but not much).
“What is that awful racket?” his mother wanted to know.
“Music. I’m at the wedding, Mom.”
“What wedding? You told me you were there to scatter your father’s ashes.”
“I told you several things. You remembered one of them.”
“Somewhere on the North Shore, I think. Maybe Sandwich.”
“That’s barely on the Cape,” Griffin said. “You hated Sandwich. We might as well put him in the Canal.”
“I don’t know who you mean by we. I’m simply making a suggestion. The decision is yours.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said, and should have hung up right then. Instead he asked, “Do you remember the Browning family? From the Cape?”
“Don’t tell me you ran into them.”