Tammy wouldn’t come all the way into the room. She stood in the doorway of the bride’s room at the church with one hand on the frame. She was wearing the sage green dress I had picked out for her back in June. And she stared at the carpet the whole time she talked. “Mom says you ought to give the ring back today. Before anybody goes home.”
I was sitting on the little bench in front of the mirror. My bouquet was in my lap. I had been holding it so long that the wet stems had left a damp spot on the front of my dress.
“All right,” I said.
“And she says.” Tammy stopped. She swallowed hard. “She says the family is out nine thousand dollars. For the rehearsal supper at the steakhouse last night, and for the cruise. She says she expects you to make that right. Since it was all done for you.”
Behind me, in the folding chair by the radiator, my Grandma June set her cane down flat on the floor.
That was the only sound in the room.
“Nine thousand,” I said.
“She wrote it down.”
Tammy held out a church offering envelope. On the back, in pencil, in the neat, square numbers of a woman who had kept the books at the lumberyard for twenty-six years, it said:
Rehearsal supper 2,100. Honeymoon cruise 6,900. Total 9,000.
The wedding dinner wasn’t on there. She couldn’t put that on there. My father had paid for the wedding dinner.
I took the envelope. I don’t know why. I think because somebody handed me something, and my mother raised me to take what I was handed and say thank you.
“Thank you, Tammy.”
“Amy Jo, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to be the one. She’s out in the car and she won’t come in, and she said if I didn’t tell you, she would.”
“I know you didn’t want to.”
“He’s my brother,” Tammy said, “and I could wring his neck.”
“I know that too.”
She was twenty-six years old and her mascara had run halfway down her face. I got up and hugged her. Bouquet and envelope and all. Then she went back down the hall carrying her heels in her hand.
It was 3:41 in the afternoon. I know because the clock in the bride’s room was one of those old school clocks with a red second hand, and I had been watching it go around since three o’clock.
Three o’clock was when I was supposed to walk down the aisle.
Here’s how you find out your groom isn’t coming.
Nobody tells you. Not at first.
At three o’clock, the organist was still playing the music she plays while people are being seated. At five after three, she started the same four hymns over again from the beginning. My maid of honor, my cousin Beth, kept slipping out to check and coming back in with a different look on her face every time.
At 3:10 she said the boys were running a little behind.
At 3:20 she didn’t say anything at all.
At 3:20, Derrick’s brother Jeff came to the door instead.
Jeff was the best man. He was in his gray suit, and the flower pinned to his lapel had already started to wilt. He held his phone out to me like it was something that had died in his hand.
There was a text on the screen from Derrick. It had come in at 3:17.
I can’t. Tell her I’m sorry.
That was it. Six words. And he hadn’t even sent them to me.
I called him. People have asked me since why I didn’t just get the man on the phone and talk to him. I did try. I called him eleven times in twenty minutes. It went straight to voicemail every single time. His voice, cheerful, saying leave a message. You can’t talk sense into a man who won’t pick up.
Jeff had better luck. He kept dialing, over and over, and inside the hour Derrick answered him. Once.
He was sitting in his pickup out at the lake. The spot where he liked to fish. He wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t in a ditch somewhere. He just wouldn’t come.
Then he hung up on his own brother and turned his phone off.
So that’s where things stood when his mother sent her envelope in.
A hundred and forty people sitting in the sanctuary. An organist on her third trip through the same four hymns. A groom in a pickup truck at the lake.
And a bill.
My father came in next. He must have passed Tammy in the hallway.
Daddy’s name is Ray. He was sixty-six that fall. He worked maintenance at the cement plant for thirty-one years, and he drove a fuel tanker in the Gulf War in 1991. He is not a talker.
He had on the first new suit he’d bought since my mother’s funeral. Charcoal gray. He’d let Beth pin a rose on it that morning. And he looked like exactly what he was. A man who had been standing at the back of a church for forty minutes, ready to walk his daughter down the aisle.
He looked at the envelope in my hand.
“What’s that?”
I gave it to him. He read it the way he reads everything. Slow. Chin tucked down. Then he read it a second time.
“Lorna sent this.”
“She sent Tammy with it.”
“Today.”
“Just now.”
He folded the envelope once, carefully, and put it in the inside pocket of his suit coat. His hand wasn’t quite steady doing it.
“Jeff says he’s out at the lake,” Daddy said. “I can be in the truck in two minutes.”
“And do what?”
“I’d think of something on the way.”
“Daddy.”
“I would.”
“I know you would. That’s exactly why you’re not going.”
I sat back down on the bench, because my knees had quit on me.
“If you have to go fetch a man and drag him back here,” I said, “I don’t want what you’d be bringing.”
He stood there a long time. I could see him wanting to argue with me and not finding any place to start.
Then Grandma June spoke up from her chair by the radiator.
“Raymond. What’s Connie got in the warmers over at the hall?”
Daddy turned around. “What?”
“The supper. What did you buy?”
“Roast beef. Cheesy potatoes. Green beans, slaw, rolls.” He said it like he was reading off a parts list at the plant. “A hundred and forty plates at thirty-five dollars a plate. Connie put the beef in at six this morning.”
“And the band?”
“Fifteen hundred. They’re already set up. I saw their trailer when I drove by at noon.”
“So that’s what,” Grandma said. “Sixty-four hundred dollars?”
“Yes ma’am. Sixty-four hundred.”
“Paid?”
“Paid Tuesday.”
Grandma June was eighty-four. She has a hip that came from a hospital in Wichita and a cane she mostly uses for pointing at things. She pointed it at me now.
“Then there’s a hot supper for a hundred and forty people sitting four blocks from here. Bought and paid for by your father. And there’s a hundred and forty people in that sanctuary who put on their good clothes and drove in from all over creation and haven’t had a bite since noon.”
She let that sit in the air.
“Your cousin Mark came all the way from Amarillo. The Hendersons are in their eighties and they drove up from Coffeyville. I don’t know what you want to do, sugar. But I know what’s going to waste if you do nothing.”
Daddy was looking at me.
“It’s yours,” he said quietly. “I didn’t buy that supper for him. I bought it for you. You tell me what you want done with it, and I’ll do it.”
I turned and looked at myself in the mirror.
Thirty-one years old. Dark hair pinned up by a girl at the salon on Main Street who told me that morning I looked just like my mother. A plain white dress. No beading. White satin heels that had been pinching my toes since two o’clock.
I thought about the other choice.
Pastor Dale going out front and saying something soft. A hundred and forty people filing past me on their way to the parking lot with their eyes on the floor. Me lying on my old bed at Daddy’s house in this dress. And four blocks away, a woman named Connie scraping roast beef into black trash bags.
I thought about Lorna’s envelope too. I could have sent Tammy back out to that car with a sentence of my own. Believe me, I had a few ready. But a sentence wasn’t going to feed the Hendersons. And it wasn’t going to make me feel one bit less left.
“Beth,” I said. “Hand me my bag. The blue one.”
In the blue bag were the white canvas sneakers I’d bought for dancing at the reception.
I took off the satin heels. I set them side by side under the bench, neat, the way you’d leave something you weren’t coming back for. I put on the sneakers, and I tied them in double knots.
Grandma June watched me do it.
“One more thing,” she said. “Don’t you dare send that band home.”
“Grandma.”
“I mean it.”
She planted her cane and pushed herself up out of the chair.
