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oddest.
     
    That came at the height of the dinner, prime rib and lobster. Charles Dudley Grum got up to make a toast to his son. He was at least as drunk as the younger man, if not drunker. Picture an enraged bull swaying like a cobra, eyes pink, nose red.
     
    Prior to this my sister kept telling me that her future father-in-law was a charmer. Up to then I’d missed that part of his personality. What happened next did not add the notion that he was charming to my list of things I thought about him. Perhaps all who knew him and his family were charmed by their reported wealth and reputed influence in local politics. At the reception, I didn’t note anything that resembled charm in anyone in Edgar’s family.
     
    Charles Dudley Grum was at the podium in the middle of the head table. He held a randomly screeching microphone and lurched back and forth worse than a drunk trying to walk down the aisle of a moving train.
     
    Well, I wasn’t married to him.
     
    It’s what he said that I found most awful, weird, offensive. He talked about my sister as, “the little woman who could now keep house the way a woman should,” and, “the new addition to a family that knew how to keep traditional values sacred,” and “that she’d married into a family that knew how to pray and keep things holy.”
     
    You think I’m making this up? It got worse.
     
    He talked about what a fine man Edgar was despite his wayward youth. Then he began listing all the wayward youth things his kid had done. Beginning with a disgusting toilet training incident, moving on to drunken teenage puking, then with him, daddy Charles Dudley, being called to settle run-ins with school authorities and with the law.
     
    Weird, odd, obnoxious was bad enough, but the eternal recitation was boring beyond belief. My parents and the rest of my family sitting at our table had frozen smiles plastered on their faces. The entire rest of the audience, except Scott next to me, were laughing and cheering and carrying on as if Charles Dudley Grum was announcing the last triumph of the idiot right.
     
    Except, of course, Mrs. Grum, whose stony expression altered barely a whit. At the best of times her face looked as if someone had recently shoved a baseball bat up her butt, thick end first. At that moment her expression looked like maybe the bat had been replaced by a smallish cucumber. I remember wondering if this slight change meant that she was amused, possibly even having a good time? I’d hate to think she was as astonished and disapproving as I was. I’d hate to think I shared any of the same emotions as she. Such thoughts might introduce the notion that she was human. At any rate, she didn’t try to interrupt or stop her husband.
     
    Edgar, instead of being embarrassed or angry, began cheering his dad on at the end of each incident. As in, “Yeah, dad,” or “You tell ‘em dad.”
     
    My main thought at the time was that at least I wasn’t marrying him.
     
    After they were married, Veronica and her husband moved near his family in Wisconsin. At the time, he had a job in a law office there as a clerk.
     
    Edgar, in my sister’s version, had tried breaking with the family. He’d quit the clerk job, become a financial planner, and been laid off by that company. His family had upbraided him for being in trade, for losing a job, for not being as successful as the rest of them.
     
    The unofficial version I’d gotten at their wedding from a drunken cousin. She’d told me that even the family couldn’t put up with his incompetence, or at least they stopped putting up with his incompetence when he started costing them money. Nothing criminal, she insisted at the time, just rampant stupidity.
     
    Most recently, he’d signed on to work temporarily in the county repub office and the anti-recall campaign.
     
    Scott and I never went to my sister’s for the holidays.
     
    In fact, other than a few lunches, I rarely saw her although we talked on the phone