The Bouquet My Sister Took

Aunt Marge

“Aunt Marge,” my daughter said. “May I ask you something?”

Her hands were shaking. I could see it from where I stood, the little tremor running along the microphone cord. But her voice was steady, and it carried, because Zeke had set the sound system for a hundred and forty people and a dance floor, and nobody in that hall was about to talk over her.

“You’re right that I can’t walk down an aisle,” she said. “But I never asked to marry anybody. I’m ten.”

A few people let out the kind of breath you let out when you did not know you were holding it. One of Wally’s cousins laughed, a short surprised bark, and then clapped a hand over his own mouth.

My sister’s smile had not moved yet. She still thought this was going to be cute. I could see it in her shoulders. She thought a little girl was about to say something sweet and slightly embarrassing, and she would get to be gracious about it in front of everyone who would be reading her name on a ballot in six weeks.

“My real question is about the Harvest Supper,” Trina said. “It’s about the jar with my picture on it.”

I felt my stomach go cold.

I want to stop the story for a second and tell you what that meant, because every person in that hall who lived in Ottawa Bend knew about the Harvest Supper, and I was one of two people in the room who knew what Trina was about to do with it.

The Jar

The previous October, the church held its annual Harvest Supper in the basement of St. Anne’s, the way it does every year, and that year Marge had decided to attach a cause. She called it Wheels for Trina. The goal was a wheelchair accessible van, a used one with a side ramp, because I had been lifting my daughter in and out of our Buick for eighteen months, and my back was done, and Vic’s back was starting to go too.

I did not ask for this. I want to be clear. Marge came to our kitchen with a flyer in her hand. She had already ordered the printing. It said Help Trina Roll Again across the top, with a photograph from Trina’s eighth birthday party, the last one before the accident, in which my daughter is standing on her own two legs, grinning, holding a sparkler.

She was good at it. I will give her that. She ran the whole thing like a general. Mason jars with Trina’s picture taped on the front went out to the feed store, the bank, the diner, the vet clinic where I work. Marge called the Lions Club, and the Lions Club’s treasurer, a retired grain elevator manager named Arlo, took charge of the cash, because Arlo had counted the proceeds of every fundraiser in our county for thirty years.

The Harvest Supper was a Saturday. Trina sat at the donation table the entire evening, behind a banner that said Wheels for Trina, with a cash box on one side and Arlo on the other.

I should tell you something about my daughter that is relevant. She loves numbers. She loved them before the accident, and afterward, when so much else got taken, numbers were the thing she kept, because a column of figures does not care what your legs can do. She was nine years old that night, sitting at a folding table with a retired treasurer, and he let her help count.

They counted the cash twice. Arlo said it was habit, that you always count twice. Trina wrote each count in a little green notebook with a pencil on a string, the notebook she carried everywhere in the pocket on the side of her chair. Cash and checks both. She wrote the total, she underlined it, and she showed Arlo, and Arlo, who does not smile much, wrote his initials under it and said, “Young lady, you ought to be a bookkeeper.”

The total was fourteen thousand two hundred dollars.

At the end of the night, Marge climbed the steps to the little stage at the front of the basement, took the microphone, and told two hundred people exactly that. Fourteen thousand two hundred dollars, she said, for Trina’s van. She cried a little. The whole room stood up. I stood up. Trina, in her chair, looked at me and mouthed the number, and her face lit up like the Fourth of July.

Marge took the zippered deposit bag from Arlo, because she was the chair of the drive, and she signed Arlo’s receipt, and she told him the money would go straight into the account Vic and I had opened at the credit union for that purpose.

That was a year ago.