The Glued Chair At The Wedding
The ceremony
The ceremony was beautiful, and that was the hardest part of the whole day, harder than the barn, harder than the glue.
They got married under the big open doors with the green fields behind them and the light coming in gold and level across the floor. Ruth cried when Kyle said his vows. My Ruth, who had every right to hate that boy and did not have it in her, sat in her blue dress with her hands folded and cried because to her he was still the little boy with the apron tool belt handing me the wrong nail. I held her hand. I did not cry. I had cured concrete where my chest used to be.
Ashley came down the aisle in a big lace dress, smiling like a girl in a paint advertisement. Kyle looked at her like she hung the moon. I watched his hands, the same hands that had held that tube of glue steady while he told her to put more around the edges so his sick mother would be really stuck. And I felt the last of something leave me. Not love. You do not stop loving your child, no matter what he does. But hope. The hope that I had misheard, that there was some explanation, that my boy was still in there. That left me under the open barn doors while the preacher pronounced them man and wife.
The reception
Then came the reception, and it built the way these things build. The band set up in the hayloft balcony and played soft. The caterer’s people carried out platters, ham and chicken and green beans done the way Ruth does them, because Dena had told them how. There were mason jars of wildflowers on every table and the June evening came in blue through the big doors and the string lights came up warm.
Ruth sat next to me at the end of the head table, exactly where I put her, on a good clean chair, and she was happy. She did not know. She leaned over halfway through the meal, her face soft, and whispered, “It was worth coming, Walt. Look how handsome he is. It was worth it.” And I squeezed her hand and said, “Yes, Ruth. It was worth every bit of it.” And I meant something she did not know I meant.
Down the table in the center, in the chair of honor, Ashley sat in her big lace dress, her back very straight, her face flawless, presiding over the room like she had won something. Her dress covered the whole seat. She could not have known. Every so often she leaned to say something to a bridesmaid and laughed, this bright ringing laugh, and Kyle sat beside her, relaxed, a man who thought his plan was ticking along on schedule, his mother somewhere down the table where a camera would find her when the time came, everything set, everything perfect.
I ate my supper. I have never in my life eaten a meal so slow or tasted it so little. And I waited for the load to come on.