The Bouquet My Sister Took
The hall smelled like coffee and floor wax and the gladiolas somebody’s aunt had cut from her own garden that morning, and I remember thinking, ten minutes before it happened, that I had not been this happy in two years.
That is the part I keep going back to. Not the cruelty. The ten minutes before it, when I was standing at the edge of the Knights of Columbus hall in Ottawa Bend, Minnesota, holding a paper plate of ham sandwiches and watching my daughter laugh.
The Yellow Dress
My name is Shelly Prather. I am thirty-seven, I work the front desk at the Ottawa Bend Veterinary Clinic, and my daughter Trina is ten years old. For a long time those were the only facts I could say about my life without my voice doing something.
Two years ago, in the first week of February, a pickup truck ran the stop sign where Highway 14 crosses County Road 9. We were coming home from her piano lesson. I remember the headlights, and I remember the sound, and then I remember a man in a Carhartt jacket telling me not to move my neck. I came out of it with a cracked collarbone and a split lip. Trina came out of it unable to feel anything below her ribs.
So when the invitation to my cousin Dottie’s wedding came in the mail in July, and Trina picked it up off the counter and read it twice and said, “Can we go? Can I be in the pictures?” I said yes before she finished asking.
She picked her own dress. A yellow one with a ribbon at the waist, from the consignment shop on Main Street, and she made me iron that ribbon twice on the night before. She practiced a little speech to Dottie, which she never delivered, about how pretty the flowers were going to be. She wanted to look nice for people. That sentence does not sound like much to you. To me it sounded like a door opening.
The wedding was the last Saturday in September. Dottie married a lineman named Wally, a big gentle man who cried at the vows and did not apologize for it, and the reception was at the K of C hall because that is where every wedding in our town has been held since 1962. A hundred and forty people. Round tables with paper covers, a punch bowl, a three tier cake from the bakery in Faribault, and a DJ named Zeke who also does the high school homecoming and knows every person in the room by their first name.
At about nine o’clock Zeke tapped his microphone.
“Alright, ladies,” he said. “Everybody who is not married, not engaged, and not hiding in the kitchen, get on out here. Bouquet toss.”