Okay, try to insert yourself into that moment. Stay calm, stay cool, stay sane. No one else is crying. Everyone probably thinks it is for the best. After all the tortuous debates—abortion or no abortion, adoption or no adoption, marriage or no marriage—now suddenly everything can go back to the way it was. Meg is an ex-mother and you are an ex-father and she can go to college like she’d planned before she got pregnant and you can do whatever it is that you’re going to do. That’s right. Through your sunglasses, you can look at Meg privately; you can observe the solemn congregation, your basketball buddies with their hands folded in front of their groins like they’re posing for a team photo, your mom with her jaw set, some of Meg’s relations. It’s hard not to imagine a guilty sense of relief rippling across all their faces. You can see it as they bow their heads, and you clasp your hands in front of you. “Of dust thou art,” the preacher intones, and Meg looks at you for a second, the kind of glazed look of someone who has just been startled awake, and then your younger brother, Dooley, who is all bloodshot and damp-faced, staring at you with his mouth quivering.
