The Money My Aunt Spent On The Wedding

I want to be honest about something. It wasn’t Brooke’s line that broke something loose in my chest. Brooke has always had a mean streak dressed up as a joke, ever since we were girls, and some small cold part of me almost expected it from her. It was Gail’s line that did it, because Gail is my mother’s older sister, the one who stepped in after my own mother passed away when I was twenty six, the one who sat beside me at the hospital when Dwight died and told me she would always look out for me and for Sam. Hearing her stand up and turn my grief and my exhaustion into a party favor, in front of a room full of people, felt like watching someone I trusted set something down and walk away from it.

Across the table, Derek, the groom, laughed along with everyone else. He didn’t even glance my direction. That stung too, though less, because I barely knew the man.

My son Sam sat beside me in a little gray suit jacket we’d bought secondhand and pressed that morning on the kitchen table. He had been quiet through the toasts, swinging his feet under his chair the way nine year olds do when they’re bored, but when the laughter rolled through the room he went very still. His hand found mine under the white tablecloth.

“Mom,” he whispered. “Why is everyone laughing at you?”

I didn’t have an answer for him. I opened my mouth and nothing came out, because the truth, that grown adults in my own family had just decided my grief and my hard work were material for a wedding speech, was not something I knew how to explain to a nine year old without crying in the middle of the Grange Hall.

I thought about leaving. I actually gathered my purse and started to calculate how fast I could get Sam’s jacket on and get us both out to the gravel lot without making more of a scene than Gail and Brooke already had. Part of me wanted to spare him the rest of the night. But another part of me, the part that had spent four years refusing to let Dwight’s death turn me into someone who slinks out of rooms, decided that leaving would hand them exactly what they wanted, a quiet exit that let the joke be the last word. So I stayed in my chair. I straightened my son’s little collar. I picked my fork back up even though my stomach had folded itself into a fist, and I told myself I only had to survive the cake and the first dance and then we could go.

I had no idea the night was only getting started.

I want to back up here and tell you something about money, and about my grandfather Bud, because it matters for what happened next.