the announcement is unexpected, she had thought her cousin was as single as ever, focused on his stem career & his church volunteering, and the wedding-date listed on the invitation is so soon that the family is whispering to wonder whether (even to hope that) his bride will soon find herself delivered of a baby who is surprisingly heavy & healthy for being so premature. but when our point-of-view character meets the fiancée for the first time at the rehearsal dinner, the woman’s deep reserve, & something about the way the engaged couple touch and don’t touch, convinces her that her family has it wrong. the wedding ceremony strikes her as exotically over-religious, almost inhospitably religious, with its long sermon & altar call (which no one takes the couple up on), although she reflects that the wedding mass must feel the same way to lifelong protestants. in his sermon the minister makes much of that first miracle. of course, when the reception begins, she’s asked whether she would like a soft drink or a water. she takes the water, fingers crossed for a repetition.
what the groom’s brother has smuggled in could not be described as “the best wine saved for last” but it does make her feel more comfortable line-dancing for the wedding pictures and talking to the unknown guests. she finds that the church is trad in the sense that many of the women wear headcoverings, but it’s also not trad, in the sense that it’s some sort of relatively new group. a lot of the guests remark on their surprise at how much of the groom’s family showed up. there are crowds of children, but very few of the parents of these children came from a large family themselves, and they seem surprised & intrigued by the dynamics of the groom’s clan.
drinking secretively in the parking lot like that breaks the ice, & after the wedding the cousins in their twenties huddle in a hotel room to do something else they haven’t done in a while. then they head down to the hotel bar red-eyed, finding it weirdly empty, except for one of their great aunts, recently widowed after her much older husband’s long descent into dementia. their first shared selfish impulse is to leave her alone to her wedding-triggered grief & nostalgia, but it feels so rude, and what they intend to be a quick hello turns into the longest conversation they have ever had with her. picking up some of their unusual openness and silliness, she begins telling them stories about her courtship and early marriage. it has not occurred to them until now that before their great-uncle was a slowly-dying man being cared for sadly & faithfully by a woman who was old herself, he must have been an older man courting a much younger woman. she tells them how he took her to parties & scandalized his colleagues’ wives; she tells them how he taught her to enjoy wine. she’s laughing, and instead of calling her husband “uncle richard,” as she always has before when speaking to this generation, she’s calling him rick.
squiring her back to her hotel room when she’s tired, their own beers in hand, the cousins find out the reason for the bar’s emptiness: this hotel is currently the site of a large alcoholics anonymous conference. they pass folding tables full of aa materials; the volunteers manning the tables are, understandably, stiff and awkward as they pass. they pass by the nudged-open door of an auditorium, and overhear snatches of a charismatic speaker’s description of his struggle with alcohol: “i wasn’t a husband when i was drinking.”
with their aunt safe in bed, the cousins separate. our heroine & her closest-age girl cousin go stick their feet in the hot tub. they compare this wedding to the girl-cousin’s wedding a few years back, and our heroine finds herself (rudely) asking about when they’ll have a baby. but her cousin takes it graciously, and is even vulnerable: she finds herself too scared to lose another one. they squeeze each other’s hands & kick their feet aimlessly in the hot water, trying to relax from a day in heels.
across town, the newlyweds are dozing for the first time in a lover’s arms.