“How’s it going in there, tiger?”

“Not so good.” O’Neil holds out his quavering hand to demonstrate. “You were right. I don’t think I can shave.”

“Ah.” Stephen nods. “Connor? This is your department, am I right?”

Connor moves swiftly to the ice chest and removes another Ballantine, wiping the glass on a towel. He hands it to O’Neil. “As your doctor, I advise you to drink this. Now, then-” Connor pulls the desk chair into the bathroom and O’Neil sits, sipping his second beer, which he knows he shouldn’t have. Connor spreads the cream on O’Neil’s cheeks, then moves behind him and gently takes O’Neil’s chin in his hands. His face close to O’Neil’s, he begins to shave him, his eyes following the path of the razor.

“Are you sure you know how to do this?”

“No.”

O’Neil closes his eyes and lets himself feel the scrape of the blade over his chin, where he usually cuts himself. In his ear, Connor’s breathing is a thin whistle, and smells a little of beer. O’Neil can’t believe how late he is, but there doesn’t seem to be anything he can do to hurry himself up.

“There you go, champ.”

O’Neil looks at his reflection in the mirror, Connor standing beside him with the razor in his hand. He rubs his hands over his cheeks and neck, the firm point of his Adam’s apple.

“Nice,” he says.

“I can do the rest too,” Connor offers, rinsing the blade. “I had to do that in medical school.”

“I’m feeling a little queasy,” O’Neil says. He looks up at his friend, in his hilarious seersucker suit. “How about an appendectomy?”

“Only,” Connor says, “if you promise to hold very, very still.”

Stephen has laid out O’Neil’s clothes on the bed, and while he dresses, Connor and Stephen drink the rest of the beer and talk about Connor’s wedding, which was the summer before, up in Montreal.

“You’re really lucky,” Connor says. He is hunched over in his chair, absently swinging his empty beer between his knees. “A wedding should be small. I look at the pictures now and think, Did I really go to that party? Though you should see them.” He rolls his eyes and clucks his tongue happily. “Like something from a magazine.”

At the mirror O’Neil struggles with his tie. It’s new, with bright swirls of yellow and blue to set off the threads of his suit, and he can’t seem to get the lengths right. He ties it first with a Windsor, then with a double Windsor, and each time the skinny end comes out too long. Then, without thinking, he somehow gets it right; he yanks the ends and a tight dimple appears below the knot. He slides into his jacket, shaking his shoulders to pull loose the shape. He is looking at his reflection, taking it in, when suddenly he remembers: the boutonniere. He was supposed to pick it up that morning at the florist’s across from the hotel. But there is no time now. He takes the rose from Alice ’s tray, squeezes off the stem with his fingernail, and pushes it through the buttonhole of his lapel.

O’Neil turns from the mirror to tell his friends he’s ready, and finds them standing at the far window, their broad backs toward him. His eyes follow their gaze; it is Simone, once again crossing the lot to her car. O’Neil’s first thought is that he isn’t so late after all, that not all the guests have left. But then this thought is pushed aside, he sees Simone through his friends’ eyes, and he knows he is looking at a beautiful woman, maybe the most beautiful woman he has ever seen in his life, crossing the lot below them. Her steps are slow, graceful, without calculation; she seems almost to float. O’Neil is filled with a reverent awe, traveling the length of his body like a beam of light.

“Unbelievable,” Stephen says.

“They’re different from us.” Connor, his hands buried in his pockets, shakes his head in amazement. “It’s really very simple. I speak not as a married man but as a scientist.”

The three men watch while she opens the driver’s door, removes her hat, and, balanced on her slender heels, lowers herself sideways onto the driver’s seat, her legs dangling out of the car so that she can smooth the front of her dress. She pulls the door shut behind her, places the hat on the seat beside her, and arches her back to examine herself in the rearview mirror, pushing a hand through her long hair. The engine purrs to life and she backs out of the drive.

Still they do not move. The silence of the room falls over them. It is as if they have seen an apparition, a sign, as if they have dreamed the same dream together. Then his friends see that he is ready, they gather their things, and they take O’Neil to his wedding.

It is twelve-fifteen by the time they arrive at the house, and O’Neil’s sister meets him at the door. It rained a while back, she tells him, after they spoke on the phone; just a shower, but the path is too muddy to go up the hill.

“I know,” O’Neil says. “Where’s Mrs. Cavanaugh? I’ll talk to her.”

O’Neil enters the crowded house to look for the minister and finds her in the den, taking a last look at her notes for the homily. She is wearing a thick wool sweater under her vestment, and O’Neil hugs her, embarrassing both of them, because he has never hugged her before. “I think we’re going to do it under the tent,” he tells her. “If that’s okay. Plan B.”

They agree to start in about ten minutes, and O’Neil excuses himself to find Mary. But out in the living room he realizes it’s hopeless; Mary is upstairs with her friends, and he knows that if she wanted to see him she would be downstairs now. His gaze travels the packed room. Somehow, everyone seems to know that the wedding is moments away, and O’Neil realizes that, just as he had wished, all the last decisions have been made for him, that his late arrival was expected and understood, as much a part of the fabric of the day as food and vows and the problem of the weather. There is nothing more to do now, nothing to arrange. He sees a photographer gliding through the crowd, and notices for the first time that the room is filled with flowers; he hears, drifting from the lawn outside, the sound of a fiddle, playing a waltz that he and Mary chose a month before, though he does not remember choosing it, just as he does not remember hiring the photographer or ordering the flowers; none of these. Stephen hands him a glass of water, and he drinks it down in one gulp, asks for another, and drinks that down too. It is May twenty-ninth, O’Neil thinks. I am thirty years old. The woman I will marry is upstairs. These simple facts seem suddenly to hold his whole life, and he is glad for it, right down to his bones. They have saved him, though he did not know he had to be saved. And something he heard earlier in the day comes back to him: Then, you and she will be together. That’s the nicest part, I think.

His sister is beside him. “See?” she says. “It’s not so hard.”

“So this is what it’s like.”

“That’s right, hon.” Kay smiles at him and takes his arm. “This is what it’s like.”

She leads him outside. The guests have followed them out to the lawn, and O’Neil sees that chairs have been put under the tent with an aisle for them to pass through, and that the sky is low and gray. He sees that two chairs are empty, where his parents would be, and he remembers what it was like to love them, as, with his sister and Stephen, he follows Erin Cavanaugh to the front of the tent. He turns and as he turns the day drops away and his vision takes in the whole company-Mary’s parents and siblings, the people they work with and have gone to school with, their friends and their children-and in his heart he marries each one of them, for he knows that this is the one sacrament, the one blessing in his life; and then they, too, depart his consciousness, leaving only Mary, who stands at the far end of the tent. Slowly she approaches, her hair wreathed in the deep silence of flowers; then she is there. Mary. He takes her hand, and then, as if they themselves had willed it-as if such acts of love were possible-a soft wind shakes the tent, the air descends, and gently, it begins to rain.