My sister likes being married.   She likes it so much she's done it four times so far.

Her second wedding was her Big Southern Church Wedding, the one that was meant to be forever because it would take that long to justify the cost.   It was the one she dreamed of when she was a child, wearing our mother's white pantyhose on her head like a veil.   I was seventeen, and unaware of the intense speculation as to what exactly she and her future second husband saw in each other.   Apparently, this second man to win her heart was not what anyone expected.   He was a rough sort, his family probably only one or two generations removed from the hills.   I thought he was as good as gold, as anyone willing to put up with my freakishly pretty, freakishly loud sister had to be.

It was a hot August day in North Carolina when he and my sister were married in great-aunt Charlotte's church, a picturesque sanctuary that smelled like God.   And everyone knows God smells like old hymn books and lemon furniture polish.

The groom was hung-over.   The bridesmaids' heels kept getting caught in the plastic runner someone from the church had placed on the carpet to keep it clean.   Dad walked my sister down the aisle, maybe a little reluctantly.   It was hard to tell with Dad.

The kiss was long.   People saw tongue.   Honest to God tongue.   My mother spent the entire reception in the church's fellowship hall trying to be a goodwill ambassador.   If she could only get us all to grab hands and sing kumbaya, then we could get past our silly differences.

Great-aunt Charlotte was suspiciously calm, and we all figured she'd raided her emergency stash of happy pills.   She smiled and made it her mission to constantly refill the butter mint bowl because the soft mints kept sticking together in the heat.

We lost sight of great-aunt Charlotte the moment the groom's beloved dog - a pit pull named Nasty - sauntered into the reception hall, decked out in a big white bow.   He heralded the groomsmen, who brought Budweiser like wise men with gifts for baby Jesus, solemnly putting the cooler at the groom's feet.   Things got very rowdy and very loud after that, pushing the older and more conservative guests out the door with the force of floodwater.   The cake ended up thrown, and then worn on more than a few good dresses.   The bride and groom disappeared for a while in the groom's truck.   They came back in jeans and cutoffs, looking...shall we say...sexually satisfied.

I think great-aunt Charlotte sneaked out the bathroom window.   I stayed.   I didn't want to miss a moment of this.   It was something that was going to be prayed about for ages by the little old ladies who would clean the church.   It was an embarrassment to both mothers.   It was also, in a lifetime of watching with a little sister's green-soaked envy, the happiest I have ever, ever seen my older sister.

They went to the Bahamas on their honeymoon, where they drank a lot and brought home photos of topless women from the nude beach.   Seven years and one beautiful baby daughter later, they divorced.

I still think about that wedding.   It was a naysayers-be-damned, have-fun-and-don't-care-who-knows-it kind of day.   It was a pit bill in a big white bow.   They didn't have a worry in the world.   All that mattered was that moment.   The ending was so far away that it didn't matter.

It didn't matter at all.

There was always a party on Halloween night at Uncle Lester's house.   The entire extended family would show up.   His was the oldest house in the neighborhood, a sprawling tower of creaking timber held together by dovetails and family stories.   The little kids would go trick-or-treating in Uncle Lester's neighborhood.   The adults would indulge in what they called the Family Liquor, the good stuff from Uncle Lester's basement.

His neighborhood was always alive with doorlights on Halloween night.   Kids in homemade costumes roamed the streets in search of a sugar high, a silent network of ghosts and princesses sharing in passing which houses had the best candy.

I remember being one of those kids.   We were a focused band of sweet teeth and sweaty hands.   At that age, Halloween was about the candy .   The costume was just a means to get the candy .    It was a prop, nothing more.   It wasn't like fishing, when the better bait yielded a bigger catch.   We figured we could make up anything and the adults at the door would buy it.   They wanted to give us the candy.   It wasn't unusual to see a kid wearing a spaghetti pot on his head and calling himself a robot, or someone who'd put ketchup in his hair and saying he'd been murdered.

The year I turned thirteen, I was too cool to go trick-or-treating in Uncle Lester's neighborhood anymore.   But hanging around the adults at the party was an appalling idea, because some of them would always dress up in what was a frankly embarrassing display of Elvira wigs and Elvis sideburns.   At thirteen, I discovered, Halloween became all about the scare .   The darkness behind doors became alive with giggles as we merry band of teenaged cousins hid and waited to frighten unsuspecting family members.   That Halloween, after one too many scares in the bathroom when we hid behind the shower curtain and one too many complaints from parents around the neighborhood for chasing trick-or-treaters down the street with black licorice ropes we said were snakes, we were ordered to stay inside, upstairs , and to behave.

We were thrilled.   Upstairs was undoubtedly the scariest place in Uncle Lester's house.   Here is where the real history of the house lived - in the seven bedrooms.   We knew by heart the rooms where great-grandmothers were born and great-great grandfathers died.   And we all knew Lindy's room.   Lindy would have been one of our gaggle of white-haired great-aunts, had she not died of tuberculosis at age ten.   In her bedroom.   We knew it was three doors down from the upstairs bathroom.   And we never went in there.   Uncle Lester once said he saw the ghost of Lindy in there when he was a boy.   He stored stuff he never needed in that room, just as an excuse to stay out of it.

Now in exile, we teenagers decided to sit in the long hallway outside Lindy's room that night while the party carried on downstairs.   We found candles and lit them, then we took turns trying to psych each other out by making up rhymes to summon Lindy's ghost.   Someone swore they heard a knock in the room.   There were several dares, but no one had the courage to go in.   When that ceased to be fun, we decided to play hide-and-go-seek in the dark.   We turned off all the lights while one of us stood at the bottom of the stairs and counted to thirty.   It was black-cat black once the lights were out, and the hiders scrambled blindly around, trying to find a nook to squirm into.   I found the bathroom by the cool hollow sound of it and I felt my way down the hallway, counting the doors.   I stopped at four.   Not three.   Three rooms from the bathroom was Lindy's room and no one in their right mind would hide in there.

I entered and felt my way to the closet door, always to the left in every room.   I opened it and crawled in, closing the door behind me.   I sat on the floor and held my breath.   I felt a shuffling to my right and something brushed my arm.   I remembered giving a small scream.   "Who's here?"

"Just me."

It was my cousin Ingrid.   Darn, we'd both found the same hiding place.   But I wasn't about to leave and try to find another.   I didn't want to be the first one caught.   It was a pride thing.

"We can both hide here," I said.   "Just be quiet."

I don't know how long we were in there.   It was dusty and cold and everything was muffled.   I could barely even hear the party downstairs.   I shifted my position several times, growing unusually sleepy and tired, like the way you feel at the end of a long car trip, wrapped in a bubble of light sleep, the noise of the outside world still buzzing close to you, not letting you completely fade away.   It was strangely sad.

I finally said sleepily, "Do you think they forgot about us?"

No answer.

I heard a thump coming from the bedroom, then a shaft of light appeared at the crack under the closet door.   "No fair!" I whispered to Ingrid, suddenly awake and indignant.   "No lights!   That's the rule!"

The closet door flew open and all my cousins were clustered there, looking down at me as if I were dead, or the very least mortally wounded.

"Are you all right?" one of them finally asked.   "We've been calling for you for the past half-hour!"

"What's going on?" I said, standing stiffly and squinting against the light.   "Ingrid and I were just hiding.   What happened?"

"I wasn't in there," Ingrid said from the back of the group.   "I'm right here."

I looked to my right in the closet, and no one was there.   My skin prickled.   I looked back at my cousins, then looked beyond them to the room, at all the broken furniture and boxes of things Uncle Lester never used.

I had mistakenly entered Lindy's room.   I had been hiding in Lindy's closet.