WE have reached that recognizable wedding-reception moment when the D.J. queues up “Brown Eyed Girl,” the groom’s great-aunt grinds down to the floor in her silk pantsuit, and then needs a lift up. The caterers have replenished the empty steam trays with cheeseburger sliders, and the bridesmaids have removed their shoes. Anything could happen.

I’ve got two little brown-eyed girls back at home, a sitter who can stay until 1 a.m., and their father, Scott, standing next to me in his seersucker suit. I married him nearly a decade ago in this same chapel on the shady grounds of the Southwest School of Art, tucked along a slow curve of the San Antonio River.

“Come on,” I say. “We should dance while we can.”

Our own wedding reception was held in the garden, but my father managed to sneak upstairs and out onto the balcony, where he raised a flute of Champagne. An old-school WASP physician from the Midwest who would later endure both of my homebirths, he’d nonetheless had just about enough of the collectivist vibe of our wedding: a banjo processional, a woman preacher in cowboy boots, a Paul Éluard poem read in its original French, and me, walking through the grass in a ponytail, holding both his hand and my mother’s. The time had come for him to make sure everyone knew who was paying for this free-flowing love.

“I’m the father of the bride,” he boomed. Later, he gulped a few of the half-finished mimosas that had been left on the patio, muttering, “Each one of those looks like a five-dollar bill flying away.”