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none of the guests will make it past the bathroom in the front foyer on the ground floor, they don’t have to worry about keeping the whole place ready for the wedding itself.
    The lawn is broad rather than deep, sweeping down to the beach in the St. Augustine grass that means home to him; he hadn’t even known there were different kinds of grass until he sat on a blanket in Central Park and noticed how fine the grass there was.
    The grass ends in a low picket fence with the pickets spaced wide to let in the breeze, and then the Gulf spreads out; the water is gray but gleaming in the morning sun­light. The home­owners’ association raked the beach this morning, as they do twice a week, and so far there are no footprints; runners prefer to be closer to the water, where the sand is packed better, and the tide has come up enough to wash away their tracks. On Saturday the wedding party will set up a bower just over the dunes, and that’s where Alex and David will get married. Then they’ll have the reception on the lawn. The noise permits have been filed, the parking and use of the beach have been cleared with the homeowners’ association, all of the furniture and tents have been rented, and Alex’s mother is spending what she would have spent on the hall and church rental to re-sod the Baxters’ lawn after it’s all over.
    The day passes with lists and consultations and end­less dis­cussions; Aaron is convinced that Alex, Stephanie and Jasmine have forgotten something he’ll be called upon to fix, and he doesn’t want to scramble at the last minute. Alex’s initial con­ver­sations with the florist have left things pretty much in order, and her vision is not complicated: She wants a stolen moment of summer, full of wildflowers and greenery, and Aaron will wrap her bouquet of daisies and brown-eyed Susans and delphinium—because bluebonnets are out of season and unavailable; she asked, because of course she did—in a swath of handspun ribbon he’s brought from New York, a remnant of silver-shot raw silk captured from the end of a one-of-a-kind bolt that a new friend had put aside for him. Her eyes widen when he pulls it from the canvas bag he’s tucked into his sewing box, and he has to quickly whisk it away and rewrap it before the tears in her eyes fall onto it and ruin the silk.
    Over lunch he fiddles on his laptop with designs for the wed­ding program, runs fonts by Alex and Jasmine and measures the borders and margins of the paper Alex has chosen in order to make sure, make double sure that it’s right before he emails the file to Kinko’s with a request for completion by Friday.
    And then, when lunch is over, David comes in from outside, sweaty and a little bit sandy. He wraps his arms around Alex and drops a kiss on the top of her head, and instead of fuss­ing about the sand she turns in his arms and leans into him with her whole body and whispers, “Holy shit, we’re getting married!” Within minutes they’ve taken off upstairs to get David cleaned up; apparently Alex needs to help. Aaron shakes his head as he shuts his laptop, but he can’t blame them for wanting to enjoy what they have.
    Back at college, when they first met in their a cappella group, David intimidated the hell out of Jasmine with his easy con­fidence, which left her feeling defensive and unsure when he was around. She denied it; in long phone calls Aaron stood up for him and told Jasmine what a nice guy he was, and she told Aaron he was crazy and then dragged Alex along to their end-of-semester party for backup. Alex argued with a group of the guys for fifteen minutes about the treatment of women in popular music, and continued the debate with David long after the rest of them wandered away; by the end of the night they ended up making out on the back porch while Jasmine’s friends gave her endless rounds of holy hell for bringing the cute girl who snagged a perfectly acceptable guy out from under them while they were