The reception was beautiful.
I want to say that before I say anything else, because the story I am about to tell could overshadow everything else about that night if I let it, and I do not want to let it. Two hundred people in a room with good light and good food and music that we had chosen carefully and the specific warmth of a gathering that has the full, undivided attention of the people in it. My grandmother danced for the first time in years. Daniel’s best friend gave a speech that made everyone cry in the good way. My sister did a reading that she had clearly been rehearsing for months and delivered perfectly.
There are photographs of us that night that I look at and feel exactly the thing you want to feel when you look at photographs of your wedding — the sense of a moment held, the knowledge that however ordinary the days before and after were, this day was not ordinary and everyone present understood that.
The gift table was near the entrance.
A card box, the kind you rent from the venue, white with a simple bow, set on a linen-covered table alongside the place cards and the seating chart. Guests had been depositing their envelopes there throughout the evening. I had noticed it in the abstract, the way you notice the periphery of a room when you’re centered on something else — it was full, which meant people had come and left their love in it, and I had thought about it only insofar as to be grateful.
