But it was Toby who spoke. In his usual slow and slightly off-center way, he loped toward the mountain of broken pieces that used to be their home, placed himself in the center, and—peering intently—bent down to retrieve something. To anyone who didn’t know him, what he held out to show the assembled guests would have appeared to be nothing but a random rock, only it wasn’t. It was a particular rock, as they all were in his collection.
“You know one of the great things about rocks?” he said. “They don’t break.”
Even then, nobody else could say anything. If the damage had been less, this might have been the moment to rally the group in some kind of cleanup effort, but they were way beyond that possibility. This was a bomb site. This was the end. Mount Saint Helens, after the eruption. TheChallengerexploding. The World Trade Center after the towers fell. The mangled vehicles after the accident that killed Timmy Pouliot and left the woman on the back of his bike—Elijah’s mother—with a couple of steel rods in her leg.
Al had his arms firmly around Teresa. Jake was doing the same for Ursula. Eleanor held tight to Louise. Then Cam took a few steps to join Toby and put his arm around his son. Thin as he was, he still possessed an air of strength that Eleanor remembered from long ago. This, more than anything else—more than his handsome face, his glorious red hair—had drawn her to him. It should not have come as a surprise to Eleanor that the loss Cam chose to remark on first was not that of the house, a fact she loved about him, even now.
“This was a really great tree,” he said.
Later, they would remark on all the ways it could have been worse. Because Cam had recently constructed the new building on the property, most of the family’s essential possessions (surprisingly few) had not been in the house at the moment the tree came down on top of it. Cam’s lifetime collection of unsold burl bowls was safe, as were the children’s artworks from back when they were young, his mother’s double-wedding-ring quilt. What was lost had been allthe things nobody actually used anymore, but hadn’t gotten around to throwing out.
“Thank God I gathered up all the photograph albums last summer and brought them to Vermont,” Ursula observed. Eleanor experienced a small moment of gratitude that her daughter had evidently cared about the record of a childhood and a stretch of years that had included her.
Later, the topic came up of homeowner’s insurance (the coverage which, someone pointed out, would probably allow for the construction of a more modern and energy-efficient structure: Marvin windows, granite countertops, that kind of thing). Someone else mentioned the name of a guy with an excavator—the son of Buck Hollingsworth, the backhoe operator who’d dug the pond so many summers back, the children’s hero, who had invited Toby into the cab of his machine that time, to work the bucket that dug the hole that made the very body of water in which, twelve months later, he’d end up facedown, rocks in his pockets, as his brain cells died, one by one.
“Cubby Hollingsworth,” Sal Perrone was saying. “The guy’s an artist with an excavator. When he gets done with the cleanup here, you’ll never know there was ever a tree here, or a house.”
Was this supposed to be a good thing?
For several moments, nobody knew what to do. Then Al took charge. “Listen, everyone,” he announced.“Lo que importa es que todos están bien.”
The only thing that matters is that everyone’s all right.
He took a moment to survey the wreckage. Ursula joined him.
“This family’s had to adapt to some major events before. We’ll get through this one.”
“And let’s not forget,” Al said, reaching for Teresa’s hand, “we’ve got a wedding to celebrate. There’s a great meal waiting for you all, over at the tent, so what do you say we head over there and get some food?”
Al and Teresa had hired a company in Peterborough to cater the wedding dinner—platters of artisanal cheese, poached salmon andleg of lamb with fresh English peas, a salad of organic greens served up in a giant burl bowl, bread baked in a wood-fired oven, and a dark chocolate cake with fresh raspberries. Off to the side, for the vegan crowd, there was quinoa and kale salad, and some kind of nut loaf. In spite of the events that preceded the dinner, or maybe because of them, everyone seemed to have a big appetite.
Maybe the shared experience of calamity had bonded the group in unexpected ways. For whatever reason, the conversation was livelier than at most weddings Eleanor remembered. She finally managed to meet Teresa, who embraced her like a daughter, which she was now. The Mexican American contingent and the yoga contingent and the gender fluid and the programming tribe and the retired softball players could be observed in animated conversation. Most seemed to favor the catered meal over the healthy fare. Even one of the yoga group could be observed loading a second helping of lamb on his plate. Louise, for her part, mostly focused on the cake—some of which ended up in her mouth, some on her white dress—and on gathering up the retablos on everyone’s table.
There were toasts, of course. Ursula spoke first, as the younger sister, followed by Teresa’s brothers, then Elijah. Toby stood there beside him, but said nothing, and for a moment Eleanor registered the sadness of this.
Teresa’s parents approached the microphone together. Her mother, Claudia, spoke in Spanish, but it wasn’t difficult to get the drift of what she was saying. All a mother wants is for her children to be happy, and Teresa was. This filled her heart.
Cam waited until the Hernandez family had spoken before taking the microphone. Watching him make his way to the front of the room—the old, too-big sport jacket hanging on his frame like David Byrne’s in that Talking Heads video of their youth—Eleanor was caught up short by a wave of unexpected tenderness.
He did not look well. She worried for him. And because of how they loved him, she worried for their children.
Now he stood at the microphone.
“I want to welcome you all to our farm,” he said. (Then the words in Spanish, read from a card.)
“And though something surprising and... a little difficult... happened here this afternoon—speaking not of the marriage of my son and Teresa, of course, but about... you know... the tree—I want everyone to know that this remains a good day for our family. A great day.”
He said some more things then, about Al, and about Teresa. “Our family is your family now,” he said to her parents, without consulting his Spanish file cards. He had clearly practiced this part.“Nuestra familia es tu familia.”
“And I want to acknowledge all the people who were part of bringing us where we are today,” he said. One by one he named the children. Among the names that followed, though her absence at the wedding was notable, was Coco’s.
“Most of all, I want to honor the woman who started all this with me,” he said. He looked over in Eleanor’s direction. “You were a wonderful mother to our children, Ellie.” He paused. He looked tired.
“You are a wonderful mother.”
Louise having reunited with her parents, Eleanor stood alongside Teresa and Al, who had not taken his arm from Teresa’s shoulders the whole time. Toby joined them.
“I made you something,” he said to Al, his voice soft and halting. “It’s okay if you don’t know what it is, Teresa. My brother can explain later.”
