Last Q standing.

I'd managed to find a close-enough relative to whom I could toss the question to with some degree of nonchalance, though I think I knew what the answer would be all along: "Yes, she's planning on changing her name after the wedding."

It is a learning experience for me. For we were four, in amber, and we were done; though my sister married and had a son, and I married and had none, we were still at heart those four. Subtract one for cancer and we were three; my sister having given up the letter long ago but my mother and I still starting our surnames with the familiar Q.

Now it is just me, and we are not three. We are some indeterminate number I have not ascertained yet. We are a mother, two daughters, a new husband, three sons, the five people those children married, and five blended grandsons.

I suppose that makes us seventeen, and I am simultaneously the most distant one and the only one who held on to a name that has melted away over time. I do not know if that makes me an individualistic sentimentalist or a champion of lost causes.

[on flickr: The Brady Bunch?]

I am still trying to sort out the idea of stepbrothers. I said as much to the tallest one, at the reception, when I shook his hand before we drove away: "I suppose we are ... related now?" It was said with amusement and because it was far more socially acceptable to say something wry than it was to ask the indelicate, pressing question: "Is this as utterly weird to you as it is to me?"

Did you, too, allow your idea of family to crystallize after one of your parents died, and find it a little odd to imagine reshifting your parameters to include sisters, which you've never had?

It is not so much a secret in my life that I always wished for a brother growing up, but since geekdom is so overwhelmingly male it has meant I had no shortage of adoptable fauxbrothers with similar interests. In many ways, they became my family in interest, though not in name. I now find it deliciously and amusingly odd that I actually do have some real ones now, if I decide to tiptoe closer and make myself part of their lives.

[on flickr: The five children]

That is the decision, of course. The need of it stomped through my head like elephants as we prepared for the wedding ceremony. Would I choose to remain the outlier, She-Who-Lives-Elsewhere, or would I pile chance upon chance -- that the mother I wasn't terribly close to would have married a man whose grown children I've only met once might turn out to be the kind of people worth driving seven hours each way to get to know?

Realistically, it is unlikely, but I can understand why my mother would wish.

They are there, and I am here, and the symbolic decision of hyphenation stands. I took the name I was born with, shook it together with someone else's and made it my own -- and made this life in another state my own. Life rarely lets you loop back to give glimpses of what would have been, had you made different choices. I had a day of it, and it told me what I needed to know: I will always wonder a little at what it might have been like had I stayed, but my choice was the right one for me, then and now.

Last Q standing, indeed.

It was my mother, and thanks to the ongoing performance, I had no way of answering it before the phone would go to voice mail. I watched, and waited, and saw no new voicemail notification pop up. No message.

When the musicians took a break, I called my mother back, and Geof was the only witness to the look on my face, whose look he told me later was quite priceless. The news? My mother's engagement.

Super Bowl Sunday, it had been; the question was simple and she said yes. In retrospect it was easy to see this coming; in the months prior she had been getting out more and doing more, and her life had all the hallmarks of someone who, after loss, was starting to live it again.

I called a few friends during the break and shared the news, mostly people who had met my father or those who had become especially close to me while my father was dying. It was right somehow that those people heard it first.

* * * * *

Shortly afterward, my mother sent me a photo of them together, formally dressed in matching outfits, in what my co-workers called with teasing affection the Senior Prom.

My mother was only in her mid-60s, and in the days of modern medicine and retirement accounts, that's potentially decades of living left to do. She had been unexpectedly widowed in her 50s, and the post-retirement life she'd mapped out disintegrated with a single diagnosis. Since that time, she had been in uncharted territory, the what-if that nobody wants to put much thought into: What if I am alone and you are not here? What do I do then?

My mother was a product of a different age: a responsible midlife purchase for my parents was a cemetery plot for two. Near her father, near her brother, and far sooner than she expected, near her first husband. When my father was buried her information-to-date was carved on the stone as well, indicating that her life had every intention of making this plot its final stop.

What do we do, I wondered, when modern life meets tradition in this manner, when you bought a shared headstone with one man and then years later got the courage to live the rest of your life with another?

* * * * *

The moral of the story, I suppose, is that life goes on regardless of whether or not we are witnesses to the tale, and I? I am wrapped up in a warm green blanket on the couch, Edmund's half-dozing eyes upon me, realizing that on this rare day of snowfall in Alabama, I'm preparing to buy airfare for my mother's wedding.