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"What a wild sound. And it's close. I heard owls conversing back and forth—spooky to the ears of a London boy. And that insane croaking. They sync!" He beats out a rhythm on the arm of the chair. "And suddenly stop. Then start up like they're obeying a conductor. My god, they're loud."

"Oh, our tree frogs, my favorite symphony. Fireflies sync, too." We sit facing the palest moon setting into the sycamores along the river. Quiet. Has he fallen asleep—his head tipped back, a slight frown and his eyes closed? I take the glass out of his hand and set it on the table beside him. Let him wake later in this deep southern night in spring, a night to remember. Do I see on his cheek (there's only candlelight) a shiny tear like a snail track? Why not, it's an emotional time.

I walk along the terrace wall blowing out the lanterns. Our farmhouse looms behind me, rectangular ingots of light from the hall windows stretching like doorways across the shadowed lawn. Mysterious, as houses often are, as in that painting by Magritte, Evening, where the house in deep twilight is seen by the viewer and you feel the hidden life beyond the lighted windows, all golden and shadow.

What is it like, I wonder, to be him, to walk into all this because you love a girl. There's the girl, Dara, on her own—center stage. She's compelling. She's all you ever wanted. Now a floppy velvet curtain jerks aside, and behind her stand all of us. Ready to bring to bear whatever we bring. I feel a pang of sympathy and hope he didn't feel assaulted by Rich offering to take him out duck hunting on the river, by Mama questioning him about what his father does and where do his parents live (only to hear that his mother is dead), Moira (she's looking pinched) sizing him up. How cutting she can be to those who don't live here. And by me fussing over the way the napkins are folded, and generally "driving everything into the ground," as Rich sometimes fumes at me.

Two owls start their back and forth calls to each other. Could be worse, Austin, honey, I would like to say. Could be a lot worse. As in Rich's family when I went to visit them in Pensacola for the first time. His mother, Deb, was agoraphobic, though no one knew the word then. She couldn't cross the threshold of the front door. She lit one cigarette with the end of another, all windows closed. We were fumigated. Rich's father, Cooper Willcox—I privately referred to him as Coo-Coo—a dentist originally from New Jersey, lost a leg in Vietnam but suffered even more from a terminal case of arrogance. I was helping Deb set the table. From the dining room, I overheard him in the kitchen say to Rich, "Pretty, I'll grant, but with that southern accent how do you know if she's as dumb as she sounds?" His mother's eyes squinted, then she smiled rather conspiratorially at me. I knew we would not be friends. Later, at dinner, he asked—joking, I thought—to see my teeth. Rich said, "Dad!" but I bared my gums. "Nice," he said. "Some good genes somewhere." Any compliment from him meant a quick cut, too. My mother, Charlotte Lee Pomerance Stark now Mann, would have risen on her haunches and hissed a withering comment. But I just smiled. What a miracle that Rich, nicest person on Earth, came out of that viper pit.

Little do you notice all that background noise at the beginning of a romance; not in your ken to know how seemingly ancillary people are in reality appendages who will ruin or enrich or bog down or amuse your life. Or bore you silly. Austin doesn't know what's in store, and flipping that, neither do I. He's stepping over our threshold as well. What joy and despair will he bring to the damp jigsaw puzzle at the beach, the handing around of gifts on Christmas morning, the fender bender in the parking lot, and worse, much worse, the various early onsets and faulty valves and, who knows, breakdowns. I am just feeling taut. Or weepy, though I'm not prone to that.

I feel my way up the stairs. A slab of light shines under Mama's door. As a child I'd wake up at two or three and wander to my parents' room. Seems she was always crouched on her side, the low lamp glowing enough for her to read, my father hunched on his side, back turned away like a boulder.

Rich, sleeping. His strong shoulders where I can always press my face. All in all, a fine evening, intimate and relaxed. Shining Dara. Carol, who helped serve the dinner, placed the strawberry roulade in front of her and she cut big pieces for everyone, remembering to say something particular to Austin's two friends who'd traveled to get here, and to thank her family. "Luke gets the biggest piece because the drove all the way from Sarasota." "To the best daddy on the planet." "For Austin, because we're two peas in a pod!" She's a pleaser, instinctively, a gentle presence sometimes exposing a formidable stubbornness. "Mom and Mimi, my everythings," she said. Austin, that wing of blond hair always falling over his right eye, and the constant gesturing with his hands, those fine hands that look cloned from a marble statue. Head cocked, eyes wide, smile always about to start but sometimes turning to a slight pucker. Did the wine spill onto his lap? His tie is ruined.

"Soul mate" is bandied about. She's found him and he her. Anyone could feel the hot wire sizzling back and forth between them. They are young but old enough to recognize when water turns to wine. Stand in a field your whole life, Mama maintains, and you'll get only one lightning jolt, though wasn't she hit a few more times than that? How was she such a successful psychologist when much of her handed-down wisdom is outrageously idealistic or drastic? Maybe that's why. And I think people just feel her zest strongly enough that it transfers to them. I underestimate her. How rare it is for her psychology books to sell all over the world? Growing up, I felt my response to anything—winning debates, swim club ribbons, seeing the Grand Canyon, opening birthday presents—was inadequate compared with her outsized enthusiasm. Thank god, as we cleared the glasses from the living room, no one else heard her say that Amit, Austin's friend from Delhi, "could benefit from having his ears pinned back." And wasn't Carleton knocking back a good bit of wine? She'd noted, as she passed me in the hall earlier, that the way Dara's friend Moira slumps, she'll develop osteoporosis by fifty, and that the crimped hem of my romantic blue dress looks chewed by hounds. When challenged about such comments, she replies that observing foibles makes life remarkable.