He had this way of talking on the phone that was so intense and animated, his parents could start to believe that he felt some urgent need for connection. For weeks at a time he might call every Sunday until they grew to expect it, almost depend on it, but then he’d fall silent for months and they had no means of reaching him. It seemed perverse that someone so mobile did not own a mobile phone. By now Abby had signed them up for caller ID, but what use was that? Denny was OUT OF AREA. He was UNKNOWN CALLER. There should have been a special display for him: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.

He was living in Vermont for a while, but then he sent a postcard from Denver. At one point he joined forces with someone who had invented a promising software product, but that didn’t last very long. It seemed jobs kept disappointing him, as did business partners and girlfriends and entire geographical regions.

In 1997, he invited the family to his wedding at a New York restaurant where his wife-to-be worked as a waitress and he was the chef. The what? How had that come about? At home he’d never cooked anything more ambitious than a can of Hormel chili. Everybody went, of course — Red and Abby and Stem and the girls and both the girls’ husbands. In hindsight, there may have been too many of them. They outnumbered everyone else. But they were invited, after all! He said he’d like all of them there! He had used that intense tone of voice that suggested he needed them there. So they rented a minivan and drove north to throng the tiny restaurant, which was really more of a bar — a divey little place with six stools at a wooden counter and four round, dinky tables. Another waitress and the owner attended, along with the bride’s mother. The bride, whose name was Carla, wore a spaghetti-strapped maternity dress that barely covered her underwear. She was clearly older than Denny (who was twenty-two at the time, way too young to think of marrying). Her rough mat of hair was dyed a uniform dense brown, like a dead thing lying on her head, and her blue-glass-bead eyes had a hard look. She seemed almost older than her own mother, a plump, bubbly blonde in a sundress. Still, the Whitshanks did their best. They circulated before the ceremony, asking Carla where she and Denny had met, asking the other waitress whether she was the maid of honor. Carla and Denny had met at work. There wasn’t going to be a maid of honor.

Denny behaved quite sociably, for Denny. He wore a decent-looking dark suit and a red tie, and he spoke cordially to everyone, moving from person to person but returning betweentimes to stand at Carla’s side with one hand resting on the small of her back in a proprietary way. Carla was pleasant but distracted, as if she were wondering whether she’d left a burner on at home. She had a New York accent.

Abby made it her special project to get to know the bride’s mother. She chose the chair next to her when it was time to sit down, and the two of them began talking together in lowered tones, their heads nearly touching and their eyes veering repeatedly toward the bridal couple. This gave the rest of the Whitshanks some hope that once they were on their own again, they would learn the inside story. Because what was happening here, exactly? Was it a love match? Really? And when was that baby due?

The preacher, if that was the term for him, was a bike messenger with a license from the Universal Life Church. Carla commented several times on how he had “cleaned up real good,” but if so, the Whitshanks could only imagine what he must have looked like before. He wore a black leather jacket — in August! — and a stubbly black goatee, and his boots were strung with chains so heavy that they clanked rather than jingled. But he took his duties seriously, asking the groom and the bride in turn if they promised to be loving and caring, and after they both said “I do,” he laid his hands on their shoulders and intoned, “Go in peace, my children.” The other waitress called out, “Yay,” in a weak, uncertain voice, and then Denny and Carla kissed — a long and heartfelt kiss, the Whitshanks were relieved to see — after which the owner brought out several bottles of sparkling wine. The Whitshanks hung around a while, but Denny was so busy with other people that eventually they took their leave.

Walking toward the minivan, everybody wanted to know what Abby had found out from Carla’s mother. Not much, Abby said. Carla’s mother worked in a cosmetics store. Carla’s father was “out of the picture.” Carla had been married before but it hadn’t lasted a minute. Abby said she had waited and waited for some mention of the pregnancy, but it never did come up and she hadn’t liked to ask. Instead Lena — that was the mother’s name — had complained at some length about the suddenness of the wedding. She could have done something nice if only she’d had some warning, she said, but she hadn’t been informed until a week ago. This made Abby feel better, because the Whitshanks hadn’t been informed till then, either. She had worried they’d been deliberately excluded. But then Lena went on to talk about Denny this, Denny that: Denny had bought his suit at a thrift shop, Denny had borrowed his tie from his boss, Denny had found them a cute one-bedroom above a Korean record store. So Lena knew him, evidently. She certainly knew him better than the Whitshanks knew Carla. Why was he always so eager to exchange his family for someone else’s?

On the drive home, Abby was unusually subdued.

For nearly three months after the wedding, they didn’t hear a word. Then Denny phoned in the middle of the night to say Carla had had her baby. He sounded jubilant. It was a girl, he said, and she weighed seven pounds, and they were calling her Susan. “When can we see her?” Abby asked, and he said, “Oh, in a while.” Which was perfectly understandable, but when it was Denny saying it, you had to wonder how long he had in mind. This was the Whitshanks’ first grandchild, and Abby told Red that she couldn’t bear it if they weren’t allowed to be in her life.

But the surprise was, on Thanksgiving morning — and Denny most often avoided Thanksgiving, with its larger-than-ever component of orphans — he phoned to say he and Susan were boarding a train to Baltimore and could somebody come meet him. He arrived with Susan strapped to his front in a canvas sling arrangement. A three-week-old baby! Or not even that, actually. Too young to look like anything more than a little squinched-up peanut with her face pressed to Denny’s chest. But that didn’t stop the family from making a fuss about her. They agreed that her wisps of black hair were pure Whitshank, and they tried to uncurl one tiny fist to see if she had their long fingers. They were dying for her to open her eyes so they could make out the color. Abby pried her from the sling to check, but Susan went on sleeping. “So, how does it happen,” Abby said to Denny, as she nestled Susan against her shoulder, “that you are here on your own?”

“I’m not on my own. I’m with Susan,” Denny said.

Abby rolled her eyes, and he relented. “Carla’s mother broke her wrist,” he said. “Carla had to take her to the emergency room.”

“Oh, what a pity,” Abby said, and the others murmured sympathetically. (At least Carla wasn’t “out of the picture.”) “How will that work, though? Did she pump?”

“Pump?”

“Did she pump enough milk?”

“No, Mom, I brought formula.” He patted the pink vinyl bag hanging from his shoulder.

“Formula,” Abby said. “But then her supply will go down.”

“Supply of what?”

“Supply of breast milk! If you feed a baby formula, the mother’s milk will dry up.”

“Oh, Susan’s a bottle baby,” Denny said.

Abby had been reading books on how to be a good grandmother. The main thing was, don’t interfere. Don’t criticize, don’t offer advice. So all she said was, “Oh.”

“What do you expect? Carla has a full-time job,” Denny said. “Not everyone can afford to stay home and loll around breast-feeding.”