To my family, it was strange that Annie and I weren’t married and almost as strange that we didn’t have children. My grandmother, I knew, started having children as a teenager. So had my sister and many of our cousins. Most of my mother’s siblings were grandparents by 45, if not sooner. While Annie and I were very much behind schedule, everyone seemed optimistic. Annie was smart and great with children. She had grown up on a farm and played the fiddle — an idealized country girl who could keep me in line.

If my family thought Annie and I were odd for being unmarried and childless at 28, my friends in Morgantown thought the opposite — that we were odd for even being in a long-term relationship at all. In my graduate student circles, few people were coupled-up, and even fewer had been together as long as Annie and I had. Out at bars, I’d listen as my friends laughed about Tinder or swapped stories about blurry hookups, whereas Annie and I recently had used Google Calendar to schedule times to have sex.

The idea of marriage was embarrassing. But it wasn’t that I wanted to be single and free. I just wanted to appear that way. I didn’t want to seem hickish, prudish, and tied down — the traits I saw in many members of my family. Getting away from home had meant getting away from living like I was at home. But still, so young, I had chosen to couple up.

You can’t take the country out of the boy, I guess.

Holding each others’ liver-spotted hands, Gert and Bill said “I do” in a way that didn’t seem even a little rote. The pastor said, “While we take the photos, I’ll let you sort out what to call each other.”

The attendees laughed, but after the joke faded, I noticed my mother looking around thoughtfully, working to understand the new backstitch in the family thread.

The most awkward part of a wedding is usually the intersection of two families, a feeling that should have been largely absent from Gert and Bill’s. But, for me, another neurosis replaced it: Everybody in my hometown suddenly felt related, tangled vines of my kin ensnaring the landscape, squeezing until the hills rose up higher, so high you couldn’t see out.