The Bouquet My Sister Took

The Toss

I want you to understand what Dottie did, because it matters later.

Dottie had asked me, three weeks before the wedding, whether it would be all right if she aimed the bouquet at Trina. Just that. She said it on the phone, a little nervous, like she thought she was overstepping. She said she did not want it to be a pity thing, and I told her it would not be a pity thing, it would be the nicest thing anyone had done for my daughter in two years, and then I had to hang up and stand in my laundry room for a minute.

So when the unmarried women gathered on the dance floor, and the crowd laughed and shuffled sideways to make a space for Trina’s wheels, I knew exactly what was coming. I stood at the edge of the floor with my plate. I saw Dottie in her ivory dress with her back to everyone, and I saw her turn her head and wink at my daughter over one shoulder.

She did not throw it hard. She lobbed it, soft and low, a gentle underhand toss that went exactly where she had promised it would.

It landed in Trina’s lap.

White roses, with eucalyptus and a yellow ribbon the same shade as the dress. Trina looked down at it. Then she put one hand flat on top of the flowers like she was checking whether they were real, and she looked up and found me across the floor, and her whole face did a thing I had not seen it do since February two years before.

And then my sister came across the floor.

Marge

I need to tell you about my sister, but I want to be fair, because there are people in this town who still say I was not.

Marge is forty-one, four years older than I am, and for most of our lives she was the one who got things done. She chaired the church rummage sale when she was twenty-six. She ran the Chamber of Commerce’s holiday lights. She is a bookkeeper by trade and she keeps three planners, color coded, and when our father died she was the one who spoke to the funeral director, the one who found the pie ladies, the one who stood at the front of the church and read the eulogy without once looking down.

She was wearing a navy dress and her good pearls. She was smiling the smile she wears to every Chamber lunch. She came out of the crowd at what I can only call a half run, and she hit the side of Trina’s chair with her hip so hard that the left wheel came off the floor.

I dropped the plate. I do not remember doing it. I remember the handles of the chair in both my hands, and the sick lurch as I pulled them back down, and Trina’s small body tipping and catching itself against the armrest.

Marge did not apologize. She had the bouquet. She had taken it out of my daughter’s lap with the ease of a woman lifting a coat off a hook. Trina’s fingers had not even closed around the ribbon.

She held it over her head.

“Finders keepers,” my sister said, and laughed.

Nobody laughed with her. Somewhere near the cake table a spoon rang off a punch glass and the sound carried all the way to the doors.

“Marge,” I said. I was surprised by how level my voice was. “Dottie threw that to Trina. You saw her.”

My sister rolled her eyes. She looked at the crowd and then at me, and she lowered the flowers a few inches, and she said it in the voice she uses for people she has decided are not worth the full effort.

“What is a girl in a wheelchair going to do with a bouquet?” She tilted her head toward my daughter, who was sitting four feet away with her hands still open in her lap where the roses had been. “She can’t even walk down an aisle, and no man is ever going to marry her. Let somebody have it who might actually use it.”

I have heard people say a room went silent and thought it was a figure of speech. It is not. The refrigerator in the kitchen kicked on, and I heard it, from forty feet away, through a closed door.