“Photos make beautiful things uglier and more boring,” he said. “And ugly things less ugly and more interesting.”

Maybe marriage was like that. Gradually you renamed the world and created a new one, one only you could enter. You turned flowers into money, took the lullaby of unexciting days and called it happiness.

He has on a tie-dye shirt, not because he likes the Grateful Dead but because he found one in the mothbally dresser in his room and it reminds him of being sixteen, the last time he felt this happy.

Charlie had said Garrett was having a bit of a hard time—what that meant exactly, Cece wasn’t sure, except that in guy-talk “a bit of a hard time” generally meant something much worse. It meant depression or addiction or both.

So why, driving home from the airport, had they struggled a bit to make conversation? They’d kissed, yes, and had said I missed you to each other, but then a murky drizzle of embarrassment seemed to descend upon them, as if they had to live up to the momentousness of the occasion. For the first time in his life, Charlie felt a brush of terror that

warming was a hoax—or at least a symptom of “catastrophic thinking.” Only when Garrett was in the field like this, exhausted from trap checks, did his brain get up to its old tricks; even then it was just a glimpse, like the flash of a monster’s tail.

Why this unditchable sadness? Would it hound her to the grave? Couldn’t she have a bachelorette party, for fuck’s sake, without it trailing her like a pet?

She was in her element, basking in her good fortune, glancing from one son to the other like a dog back from the kennel. She was thrilled about the wedding, of course, hosting it by the lake was a dream, but Charlie couldn’t help feeling that this was the main event for her. The Margolises under one roof.

Male friendship was all about rhythm. It was a kind of song without words, an instrumental you knew by heart, you learned the rhythm together and practiced it all the time, for days and months and years, perfecting it by feel, it was the swing of your silences, the karaoke track behind the gibberish you sang. The rhythm itself said the important