The Aunt Who Moved In

The venue was the old Halvorsen place, a restored dairy barn out on County Road P that the Halvorsen family rents out for weddings and the occasional Future Farmers banquet. Bertha wanted string lights, a live band from Springfield, a seating chart with exactly the right people at exactly the right tables, and centerpieces built around my mother’s old milk-glass vases, the ones that had sat on our mantel my entire childhood.

I was the one who ended up doing the actual work of all of it. Seating charts drawn and redrawn. Centerpiece orders placed and canceled and replaced. A binder color coded within an inch of its life, tabs for florist, tabs for caterer, tabs for the rental consultant who kept calling about linens.

“You live under my roof for free,” Bertha told me one evening, sliding that binder across the table like she was handing down a verdict. “The least you can do is make yourself useful.”

I wanted to remind her that it was my father’s roof, and my mother’s milk glass, and my own two hands doing every bit of the labor behind her intimate, elegant, nothing-overdone wedding. I did not say any of it. I had already learned what happened when I tried to say true things in that house.

Free Labor

The weeks that followed blurred into a kind of exhaustion I had not known before, the particular tiredness of working two jobs at once when only one of them shows up on a paycheck.

I still pulled full shifts at Pruitt’s Diner, where old man Pruitt kept the coffee bottomless and the regulars kept asking after my father in the careful, sideways way small towns ask about a man everybody knows is in over his head. On my days off I helped Dad at the feed store, running the register while he loaded fifty-pound sacks into the beds of pickups. And every evening, no matter how the day had gone, there was Bertha’s binder waiting on the kitchen table like a second job I had never applied for.

I addressed two hundred invitations by hand because Bertha decided printed calligraphy looked cheap. I drove forty minutes to the fabric store in the county seat three separate times because she kept changing her mind about the sash color for the chairs. I called the florist so many times about the centerpiece order that the woman on the other end started recognizing my voice and asking, gently, if I was doing all right.

I was not doing all right. I was doing all of it, is what I was doing, while being told at every turn that whatever I managed to finish was not quite good enough, and that my mother, wherever she was, would be disappointed in how little use I had turned out to be.

Mrs. Doyle from two farms over, who had brought casseroles by every week since the funeral without fail, cornered me at the mailbox one afternoon and asked if I was doing all right, honey, you look thin. I told her I was fine. Small towns run on that lie. Everybody tells it, and everybody half believes it, because the alternative is saying the true thing out loud in a place where everybody will hear you say it.