The Money My Aunt Spent On The Wedding

My name is Jenny. I’m thirty five, I live two streets over from the house I grew up in, and I have one son, Sam, who was nine that spring. My husband Dwight died in a highway accident almost four years before that wedding, on an icy overpass outside of Maple Grove, on his way home from a job site. He was a framing carpenter, steady and quiet and the kind of man who whistled while he worked, and when he died he left me a mortgage, a nine month old baby, and not much else, because we were young and hadn’t gotten around to the kind of insurance that people our age never think they’ll need.

So I worked. I still work. I do home health aide shifts during the week, driving around to three different elderly clients, helping them bathe and take their medication and get to appointments, and on weekends I wait tables at the diner on Route 9. It is not a glamorous life. I am not embarrassed by it, not really, not until somebody stands up in front of a room and makes it sound like a punchline.

That somebody, on the night of Brooke’s wedding, was Brooke herself.

She had the microphone for her toast to her new husband, and halfway through, she turned it toward our table like she was including me in a joke rather than making me the joke.

“And can we just acknowledge,” she said, smiling out at the crowd, “that Jenny came tonight, and she’s still single, and she’s doing the whole single mom thing, and I think that’s just so brave. I mean, really. Some of us get the fairy tale, and some of us get the struggle, and we love you for being here anyway, Jenny.”

The hall laughed. Not everybody, but enough. Enough that the sound of it rolled over our table like a wave and didn’t quite recede.

I looked down at the cold salmon on my plate and felt my face go hot the way it does when you are trying very hard not to let people see exactly how much they have hurt you.

Then my aunt Gail, Brooke’s mother, leaned toward the family microphone stand near the head table, uninvited, and added her own line, because apparently one humiliation wasn’t enough for one night.

“She’s not a charity case,” Gail said, in the voice she uses when she wants people to think she’s being generous, “she just needs a little help sometimes. We all pitch in where we can.”

More laughter. A ripple of it, warm and easy, the kind of laughter that comes from people who have never once had to count out exact change for a gallon of milk.