In September 2003, the descendants of John Marshall, the fourth and arguably greatest Chief Justice of the United States, gathered at the Richmond Marriott for a weekend of cocktails and lectures. I flew home to attend the reunion and arrived at Dulles International Airport a few hours before Hurricane Isabelle. Baggage claim was in pandemonium. The falling barometer had driven everyone a little mad and I had a hard time locating my parents in the crowd. I found my mother first and when I hugged her I smelled the tang of mothballs.

For years she has fought a losing battle against ravenous, rug-eating moths. In an effort to discourage snacking, the woolen carpets are stored during the summer and replaced by unpalatable straw mats. It’s become a neighborhood event. Every fall the Mormons across the street send missionaries to convert us and every fall my mother presses the boys into carrying the carpets.

“How’s the battle going?” I asked. “Is that the odor of success?”

“There is no success,” Dad said as he hugged me. “There is only containment.”

My father is a retired salesman. He has a round, friendly face and eyebrows like wooly caterpillars. In the late 1960s he started a company that sold computers to hospitals. These were clunky piano-sized machines with spinning reels and jaw-dropping price tags. It was my father’s job to travel the country and invite prospective clients to lavish hotels and weekend-long parties, where they would be overwhelmed by rich food and chatty experts who explained in mind-numbing detail just what a computer could do. It was a policy of attrition.

“The Mormons wanted our souls,” Dad said.

Mom nodded. “I gave them milk and cookies,” she said. “I think they were disappointed.”

Mom wore a yellow T-shirt covered with sunflowers and a hat with silk roses pinned to the hatband. Her clothing was always a sartorial calendar: snowflakes for wintertime, leaves for fall, and bunnies for Easter. She used to wear bells at Christmas but stopped when a retarded boy followed her through Walgreen’s shouting, “I hate bells.”

We elbowed our way towards the baggage claim and waited for the machine to spit out the bags. My parents were going to this reunion to celebrate the life of our most distinguished relation—I was going to forget my troubles; to gawk at historical reenactors, ride tour buses with cranky old people and eat doughy meals in basement banquet halls. There is nothing like the foolishness of other people to make you forget your own.

I’d just left the Midwest with a fiction MFA and a year spent as a realtor attempting to sell double–wide trailers on the frozen Iowa prairie. I sold nothing and devoted an imprudent amount of time writing a mystery novel that started with a body in the river and degenerated into chapters about perilous brain surgery and the chloroforming of small animals. I wasn’t very confident that my life was “on track” and was only too happy to fly home and defer the problem.

“Your mother has me on a diet,” Dad stood tall and sucked in his belly. “Do I look handsome?”

“Extremely.”

“He’s too fat,” said Mom. “I won’t have your father keeling over dead. Where are your bags?” I had a black rolling bag like every other traveler and we stood for a long time trying to find it on the conveyer belt. “You’re supposed to tie a ribbon,” Mom said. “A lady in my book club does that. Did you bring a nice outfit? There’ll be several fancy dinners over the weekend.”

“Not that I’ll be eating,” said Dad. “I’m too handsome.”

Mom began to rattle off the schedule, which included a trip to the hairstylist for me, a white sale at Macy’s, and a French Impressionist exhibit at the National Gallery. My parents worried that they were boring and that I wouldn’t visit unless they wooed me with the promise of fancy dinners and new shoes. Somehow, in the whirlwind of our activities, I’d forgotten to mention they were enough by themselves.

“And there’s a neat store that just opened in McLean,” Mom said. “It’s run by artists. You can buy the kookiest things, and we have to eat at Putinesca. They have real Italians in the kitchen.”

Dad put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed. “She’s a Marshall,” he said. “She’s here for the reunion.”

I was always aware of our connection to the Chief Justice. His portrait hangs in the foyer and many volumes about his life and times clutter the bookshelves of the study. Commemorative coins and framed etchings are propped against walls and intermingled with photographs of immediate family. My father, also named John Marshall, looks so much like the original that he is often mistaken for the man in the portrait. When a statue of the Chief Justice was dedicated in 1987, my grandfather, Marshall’s oldest living descendant, gave a speech. I was dragged to the event, a scowling sixteen-year-old stuffy with the flu and dizzy from cough syrup. The whole family posed for a picture beside the colossus of the Chief Justice, reclining on an enormous chair, one hand on a book and the other fallen carelessly from his lap. He looked contemplative and relaxed beside his little pink descendants.

I grew up thinking John Marshall was the first to preside over the court. This misconception is so pervasive that when the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating the first meeting of the Supreme Court, it selected Marshall’s portrait. In reality he did not serve until eleven years after the court’s inception. Yet Marshall did unquestionably transform the court he served. His cases are some of the most significant in American history: Marbury v. Madison, McCulloch v. Maryland, Dartmouth College v. Woodward. Before him, the position of Chief Justice was deemed an undesirable appointment. When John Jay, the first Chief Justice, was reappointed in 1800, he declined, saying the position lacked “energy, weight, and dignity.”

When I was in college, my father bought a replica of Marshall in the form of a wax bust. He won’t divulge the price but refers to it as his children’s inheritance. My brother and I call it The Candle. As in, “Be nice to us, Dad, or we light The Candle.” It is one of only two surviving wax busts of Marshall cut from life. It is creamy in color, less than a foot tall, and smells like an old man’s ear.

We drove home from the airport and stopped at the grocery store. There was no milk left on the refrigerated shelves. The produce was picked over and the bread aisle looked like Isabelle had touched down prematurely. “Very exciting,” my father said. He’d found a promotional cheese display in the supermarket aisle and was furtively eating before my mother could catch him.

“You know I had a book in my pocket at Weight Watchers,” he said. “Whenever I need to lose weight I can just get on the scale without it.”

We found Mom in the cookie aisle loading the cart with Pepperidge Farm. “What else do you want?” she asked. “I got those cranberry sodas you like and some pretzels.”

I also spotted a pint of Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream. “I don’t need anything else,” I said.

“How about chips? Doritos?"

“Nope.”

“You might want them later,” she said. Dad stood behind her, nodding.

“Okay,” I said. But it was my brother, Fields, who liked salty snacks.

For the past few years my brother had been very ill with ulcerative colitis. Over that time, I’d learned more than I ever wanted to about the large intestine and all the happy people on the Internet who had cured themselves of this disease by munching green algae and taking their vitamins. In all these success stories there was an underlying assumption that the sick person was in some way responsible for his illness. My brother embraced this point of view and I understood the appeal. If a person is both the victim and the perpetrator, then he is in control of what seems uncontrollable. There is work to be done, not just pain to endure.

At one point Fields checked himself into a fasting center in New York. It was run by a balding man who wore his pants so high he appeared to be living in the 1940s. His name was Rachel (pronounced Raw-shell) and he had a girlfriend named Rachel, pronounced in the usual fashion. They provided bottled water that was “highly oxygenated” to promote health.

“I don’t think water can have more oxygen,” I said to my brother when I went to visit.

“It can,” he said.

“The H2O thing seems pretty firm.” I was sitting in the basement room he’d taken at Raw-shell’s house. The whirring of a juicer sounded in the kitchen above. There were crystals under the bed. I examined the bottle of water, noting the plastic was tinted blue to give it a more “pure” appearance.

“I’m feeling better,” Fields said. He wore shorts and his knees looked like puffy cinnamon rolls compared to the bone-thin expanse of his legs. “Twenty-three days without food. I feel pretty good.”

“Mom and Dad are shitting themselves,” I said. “They’re going to get a court injunction.”

“They don’t know the disease,” he said. “They don’t know.”

And we didn’t. Things got worse. He moved to Arizona and lived in an apartment and wanted to be left alone. Periodically, he called to tell me how he might kill himself.

“I think I’ll take pills and then, of course, I’ll put a plastic bag on my head just to make sure.”

“Write it on a calendar,” I said. “You can’t just do it spur of the moment. You have to pick a day. You call me and I’ll fly out.” I was counting on being able to stop him.

The hurricane was supposed to arrive around two A.M. We got an early dinner and returned home to watch the news. A bedraggled reporter stood in the rainy night and shouted into a microphone. The Atlantic surged over a boardwalk, cars floated away on washed-out roads. The local news teams seemed cheerful in their reports of impending disaster.

We cooked popcorn and waited for the electricity to fail. The winter rugs filled the house with the stench of mothballs. “Maybe I shouldn’t have bought ice cream,” Mom said. We were ready for a mini-adventure and because we didn’t really believe in the storm’s power, we were excited.

“If the electricity goes out, we might have to light The Candle,” I said.

“Can’t,” said Dad. “It’s on loan to the Supreme Court.”

“Really?” In all the activity I hadn’t noticed its absence.

“We’ll see it on Friday. They wanted to buy it but I said no.”

“You’re renting out my inheritance?” I asked.

“Relax. It’s insured.”

Around ten o’clock our cousin Tyler called and told us to sleep in the basement. He was worried about the oak trees in the front yard. They were old and several stories taller than the house. “I think you’re in danger,” he said. He was a Corbett cousin, the only member of my mother’s family she was close to.

My father admitted that he hadn’t considered the trees. “But you’re right. We’ll all stay in the basement tonight.”

“I’ll sleep better knowing that,” Tyler said.

When Dad got off the phone I asked, “Do we have to?”

“Hell no,” he said.

The electricity failed around midnight. I got in bed and listened to the staticky sound of rain against the windows.

When I awoke it was brilliantly sunny. I heard the front door open and close and then my mother’s voice talking in a low, worried tone.

My father stood in the front yard in his white undershirt. His gray hair was tufted like a meringue. An oak had fallen in the night and the sixty-foot tree missed the house by a few inches. Its enormous root-ball ripped a hole in the yard, scattering flowers and crushing a single metal lawn chair. But the tree itself was still alive and green with late summer foliage. I thought, It doesn’t know it’s dead.

“We’re so lucky,” my mother chanted. “I can’t believe how lucky.”

“Goddamn it,” said Dad. “It’s too bad the tree came down in the first place.” He was pissed. The lucky guys were Arty’s Tree Service who drove by, saw our distress, and were hired on the spot. When cousin Tyler called he said, “Thank God you were in the basement. Think what could have happened.”

We agreed never to tell him that we ate popcorn and slept in our beds.

We drove to Richmond on Friday. The city looked considerably more blighted than I remembered. We passed defunct storefronts with metal grates pulled across façades. Trash cans overflowed. A man in a plaid shirt dug in them for food. One street had most of its grand, old trees lying on their sides. They were too numerous to clear so the city had removed only the parts that blocked traffic. We drove through a corridor of severed trunks. The newly cut wood was the color of honey.

“I wish your brother was here for the reunion,” Mom said. “He would have loved this.” But she was confusing us again. I was the one who loved all the weird pageantry. It only irritated my brother. Dad patted her arm in a gesture that said both I love you and not now. If Mom were allowed to talk about Fields she’d make herself hysterical.

This was my first hotel convention. The Marriott had several large subterranean meeting rooms, an unending supply of folding tables, and padded wall segments that could appear or disappear to change the shape of the room. We found the John Marshall Reunion tables littered with name tags and staffed by enthusiastic volunteers who were eager to pin us.

We were each given a name tag with different colored ribbons showing from which of John Marshall’s six children we were descended. Most attendees had one ribbon. Some had two. I had three.

“Dad, why are there three ribbons on my name tag?”

“The red is for Edward Carrington. Yellow is for Thomas, and the green is Jacqueline Ambler.”

“We’re descended from half his children? How is that possible?”

“Kissing cousins,” he said. “The Marshalls spent two hundred years in the hills of Fauquier County.” Dad smoothed his shirt to emphasize his reduced belly. “And we are extremely handsome.”

I pinned my name tag to my jacket. That evening there was a getting-to-know-you cocktail party. I chatted with various cousins who asked me what I did. Most were only mildly curious, looking over my shoulder in anticipation of their next connection, but one man questioned me intently. His name was Neil and he was a historian. “And did you enjoy selling real estate?” he asked.

I smiled. Nobody wants to hear the truth at a cocktail party so I talked about all the good things in Iowa and the charming little towns that populate the prairie. I told Neil about the times I showed farmhouses miles from anywhere and how the prairie roads are laid out on longitudinal lines. Every few miles they dead-end and shift eastward to correct for the curvature of the earth. I talked about the beauty of the grasslands and how the native species have a six-foot root system designed to survive fire.

I didn’t mention that Dale, my boss at Hoover Real Estate, was my constant companion as I learned to sell—or not sell—houses. Dale was an ex-radio DJ who furtively peeled scabs off his balding pate and then ate them. He kept a box of wigs and wacky glasses under his desk in case someone was “in need of a laugh.” He had tapes of himself engaged in humorous speaking at various Las Vegas real estate conventions. One especially onerous episode was From Supernerd to Superbird. I was required to take these tapes home and watch them, but after a nine-hour day at the office the last person I wanted to spend my evenings with was Dale as he pranced and sweated and talked incomprehensibly about nerds and birds. Every morning he’d ask, “Have you seen the tapes yet?” Dale thought I was humorless and often spoke to me about the importance of laughter.

“So how many houses did you sell?” Neil asked. “What was your average per month?”

“Oh, just one or two. Not as many I’d like. I spent a lot time with tire-kickers.”

“With what?”

“You know, lonely guys who say they want to look at condos but really you end up at McDonald’s buying them lunch and listening to how their wives left them for some jackass in Dubuque.” I cleared my throat. “Excuse me,” I said, as if the profanity had been a little belch.

“But you enjoyed the work? You seem very bright. I’m sure you did well.” It was less of a question and more of a statement. He needed to know I was content.

“Yes,” I said. “I did just fine.”

I left the cocktail party early and got waylaid by another convention. A Christian youth group had rented the Marriott’s other big conference hall and set up a gift trolley that sold T-shirts and mugs, all the standard gift shop fare minus the shot glasses. I stopped to admire the merchandise.

I smiled at the girl sitting beside the trolley. She looked sleepy. “So what are you guys doing in there?” I asked.

“There’s a dance performance right now.”

“Is it like a church retreat?”

“Regional conference. We do it every year.”

I told her I was at the John Marshall Reunion and this information was met with a blank expression. “He wasn’t as popular as Jesus,” I said.

I went in and watched the performance. There was a large stage with expensive lighting and sound systems. The room was overly warm and crowded with high school students. Onstage, willowy girls in flowing robes flung themselves into the arms of a stony-faced boy. Next a band took the stage. Four boys dressed in ripped T-shirts with crusty pomaded hair said they were going to “Rock for Him.” The singer clutched the mic stand and leaned it forward so he sang at his shoes.

The most interesting part of the evening was when a young man told a story about being born again in a mosh pit. The storyteller was handsome, dressed in a faded jean jacket and sporting a bandana around one wrist. He sat on the edge of the stage and encouraged people to gather on the floor in front of him. Only girls left their seats to do so. It wasn’t the story that was compelling but the way in which he told it. His voice quivered with emotion until he moved himself to tears. The girls on the floor began to cry too and I watched as a raw, intense sorrow swept through them. They hugged each other and wept. There was a sense of things coming apart and messy grief conjured and left unresolved.

I’ve never been a big crier myself but recently I’d had a moment of puzzling hysteria. I’d gone to see a therapist since my good university health insurance was due to expire a year after graduation. I figured I’d better load up while I could. At my third and final meeting with this therapist, an appealingly marmish woman named Ruth, I began to cry uncontrollably. It took both of us by surprise. I had been trying to say that I didn’t know what would happen to me if my parents died. I didn’t know who would count me among their family if my own was gone. I thought of my brother with a bag on his head. He wanted to be left alone, and except for phone calls and the occasional visit, he was alone. I wept for an hour—not decorous weeping but the pig-faced, asthma-attack kind. Ruth happily pulled out her appointment book and began scheduling more sessions. Afterwards I lay in the bed of my truck, still crying and waiting for AAA to unlock my car since I’d left the keys inside. People walked past and peered down at me. When the tow truck driver arrived, he said, “Don’t worry, we’ll get those keys out.”

The next morning Mom knocked on my door and presented me with a canister of baby powder. “You know what I like to do?” She picked up one of my sneakers and shook white powder into the foot bed. “This keeps the smell down.”

“Ew,” I said. “Please stop.”

“It makes a huge difference.”

“It looks like dandruff.” She disregarded this protest the way she disregarded all protests when acting for my own good.

“I also like to put it down here.” She pointed to her crotch. “It makes for less laundry when you travel.” She set the baby powder on the dresser and gave me a significant look as she shut the door. I kicked my sneakers under the bed.

We ate breakfast at the hotel restaurant which had a dramatic, gated entrance as if crowd control were a problem. The table was square and we pushed all the condiments from the center into the empty place setting. “There,” said Mom, “we can see each other.”

I ordered the buffet. “Start at the end,” said Dad. “That’s where they keep the good stuff.”

Throughout breakfast my mother took bits of fruit from her plate and set them on mine. My parents have always been attentive and generous but with my brother so ill, they are especially aware of me. Their love for him has to go somewhere and so it fills my plate, it deodorizes my shoes—it goes into the world seeking him but finding me.

After breakfast we took a tour bus into the hills of Fauquier County, Virginia, where the Marshalls settled and intermarried. Our first stop was The Hollow, the house where John lived as a boy. His father, Thomas, built it in 1764, when that part of Virginia was still considered the frontier. It was the finest house in the region at the time but today it looks ramshackle, like the chicken coop it, in fact, recently was. Grasshoppers bounced in the grass and climbed pant legs as we sat on bales of hay and listened to the story of John Marshall’s rise from humble beginnings to great things.

Next we visited a succession of larger and finer Marshall estates. Oak Hill, Mont Blanc, and Leeds Manor—which was on the market for several million dollars. “Who would live out here?” my father asked. He felt it was pointless to move to the country and revive a lost way of life.

We toured the addition that John Marshall built onto Leeds Manor in hopes of retiring there. He constructed walls of double thickness so that his wife, Polly, would not be disturbed by loud noises. She was reputed to be high-strung and easily distressed by noise of any kind. She died just after the addition was completed and Marshall stayed in Richmond to be close to her grave.

On the bus, historians took turns speaking into the PA. Neil told a story about Marshall’s penchant for unfashionable, shabby jackets. “Once,” he said, “when Marshall was at the market in Richmond, a visiting gentleman mistook him for a pauper and asked him to carry groceries. Marshall happily complied and the people watched as one of their most distinguished citizens carried a parcel like a servant.” He paused for laughter, which I didn’t hear above the rumble of the bus. “When his friends asked him, what was he thinking? Marshall said he was headed in the same direction.” Neil related this story as if it were a firsthand account, and several of the historians had the same tone. They seemed able to possess history in a way they could not possess the present. History served them, it depended on them for animation and interpretation. Because of this, their feelings became very proprietary.

We had lunch at Leeds church, a beautiful country chapel surrounded by gravestones. We wandered with plates of food, dribbling pasta salad onto the graves of dead and dimly recalled Marshalls. I snuck Dad a cookie for dessert and ate several myself. They were mean little grocery store cookies, the sort I wouldn’t bother with unless they were free. The chapel was rustic, with stained plaster walls and an uneven floor. It smelled musty and felt chilly even though the day was warm. I assumed, given the number of Marshalls in the graveyard, that this was the scene of all the weddings that resulted in me.

“There you are,” Mom said, waving to me through the chapel door. “I want you to meet some cousins.”

I joined their group and Mom’s knuckles pressed into my spine, urging me to stand up straight. I shook hands with a plump woman named Betty. Her brown dye-job was growing out, leaving a silver stripe on the top of her head. “I hear you’re a writer,” Betty said.

“Yes, that’s true.”

“And you’re working on a mystery novel.”

I glared at my mother. I didn’t usually admit to writing. The older and more unpublished I became, the more calling myself a writer seemed the equivalent of saying I trained cats to play basketball.

“I have a friend who writes romance novels,” said Betty. “She just published her first book. It’s set in New Orleans and there’s plenty of bodice ripping.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Is there any bodice ripping in your book?”

“Not yet.”

“You should put some in,” said Mom.

Another woman in her forties with a terrifyingly long manicure asked if I’d read Dorothy Sayers.

“No.” I said.

“Daniel Silva?”

“No.”

“Agatha Christie?”

“No.”

It was true I didn’t read mystery stories, but I considered this fact irrelevant since I had no intention of following the confines of the genre. I believed that a body in the first chapter would guarantee success even if the book were mediocre. I was trying very hard to expect success because the most accomplished people in my MFA program were usually the most self-assured. But the idea of having to write something that was not only good, but good for three hundred pages, seemed excessively optimistic. I aimed for okay and then downgraded my expectations to marketable.

There is something so un-American about backsliding. People want to read about John Marshall growing up on the frontier in a crowded shack, fighting in the Revolutionary War, teaching himself to be a lawyer. It is a story of success against all odds. That is the American ideal. But how to continue when those dreams don’t come true? This is not an American theme. The word “settling” is used to galvanize people into greater achievement. But there is a dysfunction in always striving and never reaching.

We drove back to Richmond and I saw The Hollow from the highway. The difference between the sorts of houses that John Marshall’s children inhabited and the one he himself grew up in was vast. When Marshall died he left over three thousand acres of land to his descendants. They built their homes on sprawling estates and gave them lofty names: Ivanhoe, Woodside, Ashleigh, Waverly. But by the time my grandfather was born, the money and the land were gone. The Civil War took everything. It was a commonplace story of overwhelming circumstance. Today we just remember their houses.

Part of the reason I felt eager to conceal my misadventures in real estate and writing from my family was because I did not fit the American ideal of upward mobility. As a child, I had attended prep schools and been fed liver sandwiches to increase brainpower before tests. I was constantly enrolled in extracurricular activities in the hopes that one would take and a talent would be discovered. The result was a series of disastrous piano recitals and floundering Little League soccer tournaments. I also spent time with a learning specialist who proclaimed my academic difficulties were the result of high fevers as a child. Supposedly the congestion left me deaf at a critical point of development and I was unable to differentiate between vowels sounds. “Language shapes how we see the world,” the specialist said, and then we would pronounce words together, stretching their vowels until meaning was lost.

On the last night of the reunion there was a reconvening of the Richmond Barbeque Club, which was what Marshall called his weekly social gatherings. Marshall and his friends would drink rum punch, play horseshoes and bitch about politics. This was to be the first meeting in two hundred years, and except for the fact that it was in an electrified basement banquet hall with no horseshoes and no barbeque, the planning committee assured us it would be quite “authentic.”

A John Marshall reenactor was invited. He arrived in full historical dress, including a walking stick, presumably to help navigate the plush floral carpet. I wore a dress and a pair of Mary Janes that my mother had surreptitiously filled with baby powder. I wiped them clean but they still smelled.

The fake Marshall stood apart from the main knot of the reunion. Perhaps he was making himself available for conversation, but most people glanced uneasily in his direction and kept their distance. I very much wanted to approach and persuade him to break character. I was dying of curiosity about the reenactor lifestyle. Did they all know each other? Did they wife swap? How did they maintain their sense of self?

Dad grabbed my elbow and waved to the man. “John,” he called, “This is your great granddaughter.”

“Yes, of course. I have many grandchildren.”

“Don’t let them marry each other.” I pointed to my name tag. “Weakens the genes.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he said.

Dad quickly stepped in. “Her name is Peyton and my name is also John. You must be very proud to see so many descendants.”

“Indeed I am, sir.”

They continued to speak politely, asking bland questions and receiving bland answers. Anything with a modern word prompted Marshall to say, “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” I wondered if his underwear was authentic.

There was a string of little speeches during dinner. Neil read from letters that Marshall’s wife Polly had written to him. He got teary over the endearments as if they were letters from his own wife. Dad gave a general thank-you-for-coming speech and I stopped paying attention until I heard my name called over the PA. “Because she came all the way from Portland, Oregon, and traveled the farthest to be here, we’d like to honor her with a commemorative T-shirt.” The room filled with polite applause. I went to the podium and received a voucher.

The Richmond Barbeque Club concluded with a toast. The wait staff served glasses of Marshall’s famous rum punch. It was strawberry Kool Aid so sweet it made my teeth hurt. “Very authentic,” I said to my mother. Nobody had more than one sip and all the tables were dotted with pink glasses.

I claimed my T-shirt at the gift table. They only had men’s sizes, and even the small was too big but I was glad to have it. On the front was a sketch of the John Marshall statue in Washington, DC, the one I had been photographed with at the age of sixteen.

“Congratulations,” a woman said. I turned to see an unfamiliar couple standing just behind me. The woman’s hair was stiff with styling products and her balding husband was staring at the door as if he longed to go through it.

“We drove all the way from Arizona,” the woman said. “It took several days. Did you drive?”

“I flew.”

She nodded. “Technically we traveled the farthest in terms of time but still, congratulations.”

I was momentarily at a loss. “Would you like my T-shirt?”

“We couldn’t possibly,” the woman said. “I just thought you should know. They should’ve had two prizes.”

Later, I wandered the Marriott looking for my friends the youthful Christians, but it was Sunday night. They’d all gone home. I stopped by a suite of rooms where there was an after-party. My parents were already deep into cranberry-orange Manhattans that left sugar floating in the bottom of the glass. I stood beside them and let Mom introduce me. There were still so many people I hadn’t met. I shook hands and gave my standard spiels about writing and real estate but the more I talked, the more ridiculous I felt. “I train cats to play basketball,” I told some nameless cousin.

“Really?”

“No.” I wondered where the fake Marshall was, maybe at some porno arcade or eating fast food. I went to the gym and ran until I knew I would sleep.

In a few days I’d fly home and leave white powder footprints on the carpet at airport security. “Baby powder,” I would explain. “It keeps the odor down.” People had no sense of humor after the anthrax scare.

I’d go on to get another ridiculous job, this time at a financial services office with a mostly sane boss. I’d spend several years writing and rewriting the mystery novel before I discovered how self-doubt had flawed the heart of the book.

A friend once asked, “Would you bother being unhappy right now if you knew you’d be content in the future?” The answer was no, I wouldn’t bother. But knowing how the story ends changes the story. Knowing the tree doesn’t hit the house makes Hurricane Isabelle a funny little anecdote about lying to cousin Tyler. Knowing my brother eventually recovers from his illness makes it possible to forgive myself for being so absent. Knowing the mystery novel is a flop makes me wonder why I put my life on hold for three years to write it. Perhaps we are not meant to see ourselves clearly. At the end of his life, Marshall feared his work (towards building a strong central government) had been inadequate to safeguard the country against a civil war. He thought he was a failure. One hundred and seventy years later we see only his success.

Now, when I consider the reunion and my visit to Virginia that summer, one night in particular stands out. It was the first night after the hurricane, when nobody had power. All around us the modern world halted. The neighborhoods were dark and the stars seemed to step closer. My parents and I drove around McLean until we saw lights at the Ritz-Carlton. The hotel was packed. There were no tables available for dinner, so we sat in the lobby nibbling crackers.

“We can go home and have a fire,” I said. “In the fireplace, even.”

“I just want to be where it’s light,” Dad said.

“We can play poker by candlelight.”

“Too damn dark.”

“Are you bored, honey?” Mom asked.

“We’re not going home,” Dad said.

“If the mall was open I’d take you to look at shoes. I think they’re having a sale at Lord and Taylor’s.”

We rehashed the tree falling incident and renewed our promises to keep the truth from cousin Tyler. “You know he’s my only family,” Mom said as she always did when we talked of Tyler. Mom ruminated on my turning thirty. Her own age didn’t bother her, but she found the implications of having a thirty-year-old daughter disturbing.

“It’s not that old,” I said.

“It was middle-aged back in the day of John Marshall,” Dad said. “People didn’t live as long. Your mom and I would be dead.” Mom scowled at him. “It’s true,” he said.

Mom offered to introduce me to the son of a friend who was a very nice boy, a recently divorced geologist who was just perfect for me, she was sure. I said no way. Dad speculated that I should have three children because he’d been a third child and that had worked out well. I said I’d think about it.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d just sat with my parents and done nothing. I wanted to tell them both I’d come home even if every night were like this one, but there’s never a good time to correct a fundamental miscommunication. The momentum of habit is too strong.