The Banquet For My Replacement

“I saw it,” I said. “I need that card closed. Not today. I need it closed on Saturday at five o’clock in the evening. Exactly five. Can you do that?”

She was quiet for a moment. She was a banker, and a good one, and she did not ask me why.

“I can schedule it,” she said. “Closed by the account holder. It will show that way to any merchant who runs it.”

“That’s the reason I want,” I said. “Closed by the account holder.”

“Heidi.” Her voice dropped. “Do you want to leave the deposit alone?”

I thought about it. Two thousand dollars. The price of a front-row seat.

“Leave the deposit,” I said. “I’m buying my ticket.”

I told one other person. That was Kim, my best friend since seventh grade, who works nights at the hospital as an ER nurse and who has never in her life let me do anything difficult alone. She listened to the whole plan on Thursday night in my kitchen, with her feet up on a chair, and when I finished, she said, “You are going to go to that banquet.”

“I was invited.”

“You were summoned,” Kim said. “That is different. And I am going with you.”

“You do not have to.”

“Heidi.” She pointed her fork at me. “I have been waiting eleven years to see that woman’s face. I am not missing it for a double shift.”

So on Saturday, October the third, at 6:50 in the evening, I put on the green dress my mother bought me for my thirtieth birthday, which she told me that day made me look like a woman who owned things. I put on my mother’s small gold earrings. I drove to the Lantern Room with Kim beside me in the passenger seat, clutching her purse in her lap like a shield.

The Lantern Room sits on the river end of Main Street in an old brick feed warehouse that somebody in Louisville bought and turned into candlelight and linen napkins. Randy owns the place, and he greeted us at the door in a good suit and a nervous smile.

“Heidi,” he said. He had known me since I was in 4-H. “I did not know you were coming tonight.”

“Donna asked me,” I said.

His smile did something strange, like a man stepping onto a stair that is not there. “Of course. Of course she did. Please. Go on back.”

The hostess walked us through the main dining room and then, to my surprise, straight past the head table in the private dining room. I think that was by design.

Vince sat in the center of it in a gray suit I had bought him for his fortieth birthday. He did not look at me. Beside him, in a white satin dress with a corsage pinned at the shoulder, sat a woman I had seen exactly once, in the glow of a phone screen. Her name was Stacy. She was twenty-six years old. She had very straight hair, very straight teeth, and the open, unprepared face of someone who has been told that everything is going to be fine.

She smiled at me. I want to be clear that it was not unkind. It was the polite smile of a young woman who has been told a great many things about me and assumes they are all true.

Donna stood behind them with a champagne flute, wearing a navy dress and her good pearls.

“Heidi,” she said, in the voice she saved for the last row of church. “How brave.”

The room turned.