David Nilsen

David Nilsen, Alex Nilsen’s youngest brother, is the groom whose destination wedding in Palm Springs draws Alex and Poppy Wright back into one another’s company. At twenty-four, he is beginning a life with Tham, while his reunion with Poppy makes him both a warmly comic presence and an unusually direct witness to the family history that shaped Alex. Through David, the wedding becomes more than a celebration: it reveals the care Alex has given his family, the loneliness that may have followed, and the possibility of change between father and sons.

Identity and Family Role

David is the youngest of Alex’s brothers and, in Poppy’s estimation, her favorite of them. The story gives that preference a joking family context: Alex and Poppy have a running joke about David being the family favorite. Their banter also turns the wedding into an occasion for teasing about the brothers’ different romantic futures. When Poppy points out that Alex would have been married to Sarah Torval if he had married at twenty-four, Alex replies that Poppy would have been married to Guillermo. The exchange keeps David’s impending marriage at the center while exposing, lightly, the paths Alex and Poppy did not take.

David’s place in the family is bound up with the older brothers’ history of looking after one another. At the wedding, he describes Alex as someone who put emotional energy into making sure his brothers were all right. He recalls Alex driving Betty to medical appointments, packing the brothers’ school lunches, and getting their father out of bed during his episodes. These details make Alex’s caretaking concrete: it involved ordinary, repeated work, not simply a general sense of responsibility. David’s account presents the brothers’ adult independence and marriages as a sharp transition from the household in which Alex had helped hold things together.

The Wedding and Poppy’s Welcome

David’s wedding gives Poppy a reason to propose extending Alex’s planned three-day visit into a longer, R+R-funded Palm Springs trip. Alex had already planned to attend the destination wedding, and Poppy initially expects their conversation to end after he explains the conflict with her proposed travel plans. Instead, after two more hours of texting, she suggests that he add a few vacation days; he agrees and invites her to stay for the wedding as well. David’s celebration thus becomes the practical opening through which the estranged friends resume traveling together.

David welcomes Poppy before she arrives, telling her that he is happy she is coming with Alex and that she is invited to everything. His enthusiasm is personal as well as hospitable: he has always been her favorite of Alex’s brothers, and she finds it difficult to believe that he is old enough to marry. David is twenty-four. Alex tells Poppy that all his brothers married young, and that their father has come around to supporting David and Tham. The family’s history includes a contrast between Alex’s strict upbringing—he was not allowed to listen to secular music until high school, and his decision to attend a secular university was met with weeping—and his father’s eventual willingness to support his sons’ happiness.

At the gathering, David approaches Alex and Poppy with a lightly drunk sheen in his eyes, hugs Alex, then kisses Poppy on both cheeks. He notices that they are holding hands and responds with delighted approval. The gesture makes him the first family member shown registering their new closeness so openly. His affection is physical and unguarded, but he is not only there to celebrate: after Alex goes to join a trivia game, David stays beside Poppy and asks how the relationship between them began again.

Tham and the Future David Is Building

David describes Tham as the person he is marrying, and Poppy has heard that the two are amazing together and that Tham is very fancy. David confirms the latter with a joke, then explains that Tham is a director and that they met on set. The brief account establishes a shared history and gives the marriage a specific point of origin without shifting attention away from the wedding’s family setting. David’s good-humored confidence about the match is reinforced when he jokes that his favorite brother is only getting married once, adding a hopeful qualification to the teasing about brothers and divorce.

His marriage also sharpens the contrast between Alex’s family role and his present life. David suggests that Alex may be lonely now that his younger brothers have married and started families of their own. He does not claim that Alex himself would describe the situation that way; indeed, David says Alex would never think of it as having raised his brothers and then been left behind. The distinction matters. David recognizes a possible emotional cost in Alex’s care without reducing Alex to resentment or claiming access to feelings Alex has not expressed.

Alex’s Past and the Wedding’s Emotional Turn

David’s conversation with Poppy gives her a painful piece of context about Alex’s former engagement. The family had expected him to marry Sarah Torval; he had a ring and was supposed to propose, but she was suddenly gone. David trails off when he sees Poppy’s reaction. His account does not explain Sarah’s departure, but it establishes that Alex’s abandoned proposal was visible to and remembered by his family. For Poppy, hearing that history changes the emotional weight of Alex’s loneliness: it is connected not only to his brothers leaving home, but also to a future he had once been preparing to enter.

The wedding speech brings the family’s history into public view. Ed Nilsen tells David that they have not always had an easy relationship, acknowledges that he was not always there as he should have been, and credits David’s brothers with doing an amazing job raising him. He says he is proud of David and welcomes Tham into the family. David first shakes his father’s hand, then changes course and pulls him into a brief, awkward hug. The gesture does not erase their difficulties, but it makes their affection visible. Alex relaxes beside Poppy as the applause rises.

David’s wedding therefore gathers together two linked changes: he is beginning married life with Tham, and his father and brothers are confronting what family care has meant across generations. The ending remains tentative rather than claiming that every old difficulty has been resolved. Yet the hug, Ed Nilsen’s pride, and his gay-pride pin suggest that the family’s relationships can improve when people try to love one another well. David’s role is central to that possibility: his celebration creates the setting, his account makes Alex’s hidden labor legible, and his embrace turns an acknowledgment of the past into a small, concrete opening toward the future.