The wedding was supposed to be the happiest day of David’s life. My son, my only child, marrying Brittany Peterson, a marketing executive with perfectly white teeth and an even more perfectly calculated smile. I’d spent months helping plan this event, writing checks for flowers, catering, and photography while living on soup and crackers to make my Social Security stretch. But standing there in my modest dress, listening to Brittany explain how my sixty-four-year-old appearance would somehow taint their precious photographs, something inside me finally snapped. Not the crying, begging kind of snap. The quiet, dangerous kind.