LIKE LOTS OF OTHER people in Stockbridge, we counted on the Red Lion Inn for special-event dinners. Graduation parties and sweet sixteens (Emily didn’t seem like a sweet-sixteen type, but she couldn’t get the gifts without the party), significant anniversaries, and, best of all, those early-autumn afternoons when the tourists had gone back to New York and Boston, and the locals could get a table without a reservation.

It was at the Red Lion that we celebrated the day thirteen-year-old Seth astonishingly had a hole in one. And, leave it to Stacey Lee, the Red Lion was the place she selected to celebrate making her goal at Weight Watchers. “I had fresh fruit for dessert,” she always said defensively about that dinner.

So the Red Lion had to be the place for the rehearsal dinner.

I had another reason for choosing it: The food was good, simple fare. At times it seemed that the wedding was turning into a feast of food rather than a feast of love.

The dinner was held in the Rockwell Suite, a big dining room hung with the art of Stockbridge’s celebrity, Norman Rockwell. It was billed as a rehearsal dinner, but, as I told everyone, there was nothing to rehearse. I’d done this show before.

The fact was, though, the rehearsal dinner would have almost as many guests as the wedding itself.

Kurt’s daughter and son-in-law were here from Burlington. The twins who did odd jobs around the farm, Jonny and Nick Ramiro, asked if they could come. Then there were a few decades’ worth of students whom I adored, and who’d sat through my lectures on Emily Dickinson, Fitzgerald, the Brontës, and Stephen King, and the not-to-be-missed “Proper Use of the Hyphen” talk. And so the invitations went out, until the manager at the inn said we had to cap it at one fifty.

Finally, the night arrived.

“Gaby, I owe you, like, a big thank-you,” Gus said when he saw me at the door. I assumed he was referring to my lie about his wallet and the marijuana.

“Sometimes a little fib solves more problems than the truth ever could,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, that. But I wasn’t talking about the joint. I mean, thanks for covering for me. That was cool, but I really want to thank you for not putting me at the kids’ table tonight. Really. Seriously. Thanks so much.”

“That’s because I don’t think you’re a kid. Now make sure you don’t act like one.”

He didn’t exactly smile at me, but I was pleased that he didn’t sneer either. As he turned and walked away I couldn’t resist adding, “You know, Gus, it’s amazing how a fake velvet jacket from H and M can really dress up a pair of ripped jeans.” This time he smiled.

When I looked up, the room was becoming noisy and crowded, exactly what I wanted. All my rowdy friends and relatives in one place.

I was most delighted to see Mike walking in with only a cane. Lizzie had told me that he’d been using a walker around the house, but he was determined to look like, in his words, “a normal person” at the wedding events. I rushed over to him and my strong, wonderful daughter, and we hugged. Then Mike did a little two-step with the cane.

“No tears!” Mike said in a booming voice. “This isn’t about my bad luck. This is about your fabulous luck.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” I said. “Tears are for wusses.”

Suddenly Lizzie exclaimed: “Oh, sweet Lord, will you look at that!”

Both Mike and I turned to where Lizzie was staring.

I laughed. “Jacob told me he was bringing a ‘friend’ with him tonight,” I said. “I just didn’t expect his friend to be breathtakingly beautiful and about half his age. He’s trying to make me jealous. And it’s working.”

“Not the rabbi and the hottie,” Lizzie said. “Look at Seth and Andie!”

Sure enough, when I shifted my gaze a little to the right of Jacob, there was Andie with huge plastic antlers on her head, small furry velvet ears, and a huge red nose that lit up. That wasn’t all. She wore a brown-and-white sack that made her look like the front half of a reindeer. It came complete with hooves.

As for Seth, red suspenders held up a costume that replicated the rear end of a reindeer. He too had huge brown hooves.

“So, what do you think?” Andie said as she walked, or rather pranced, toward us.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Seth said. “We’re such dears, aren’t we?”

“Well, as for Seth as the rear end, I’d say it’s typecasting,” Mike said. “And that’s not the last time you’ll hear that tonight. Very creative of our star writer and artist from Beantown.”

“Lizzie, help me get under here,” Seth said. Then he began burrowing under Andie’s part of the costume.

“This seems sort of pornographic,” Lizzie said as she pulled the front part of the costume up and over Seth’s head. We were now looking at a very lumpy reindeer.

About a dozen friends had gathered around them, and the three-piece band broke into “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

Andie and Seth began dancing immediately, their hooves tapping in nearly perfect unison.

The onlookers broke into applause. I turned to Lizzie and said, “I am so happy I don’t have normal children.”