The Baptism Bill She Refused To Pay
The Bill
The party ran long, the way these things do. There was a crawfish boil going out back before anyone even got to the cake, and Sheldon’s coworkers from the pipe yard stood around a cooler telling him what a fine father he was, clapping him on the shoulder, the kind of easy male affection that costs a man nothing and gives him everything.
Halfway through, Sheldon tapped his glass and gave the kind of toast people talk about for weeks afterward.
He thanked our families. He thanked his boss for giving him the Friday off. He talked, with his voice catching just enough to be believable, about hard work and sacrifice and what it meant to build a family the right way.
Then he turned to me, in front of the whole room, and said I was the one he was most grateful for. He said I had carried our daughter for nine months and worked the whole time I carried her. He said this party, all of it, was for her and for me.
The room applauded. His mother wiped her eyes with the church program she had been fanning herself with all afternoon. Elmer raised his glass first, before mine had even left the table.
I clapped too. I meant the parts about our daughter. I did not know yet, in that specific second, how quickly the rest of it was about to matter.
Near the end of the evening, once the coffee had gone around and half the older relatives had started making their goodbyes, a woman from the catering company came around the tables with a black folder, the kind that always means the same thing no matter which banquet hall you are standing in.
She set it down between Sheldon and me. The remaining balance, after the deposit, came to four thousand five hundred dollars.
Sheldon slid it two inches toward my side of the table and leaned in close enough that only I could hear him.
“Can you just put it on your card? I’ll square up with you later. Things are tight right now.”
He had used that exact phrase, things are tight right now, more times in our marriage than I could count anymore. It used to work on me the way a familiar song works on you, you stop hearing the words. I heard every one of them that night.