The Salary My Mother In Law Wanted
Table Nine
The Grange hall in Carver was built in 1938 and has the acoustics of an aircraft hangar. By six o’clock on the first Saturday of October, it held two hundred employees of Brandt Farm and Fleet and every member of their families: the farm kids in their good jeans, the old men in pressed shirts, the bank president in his bolo tie, the mayor, a few members of the county fair board, and the pastor from the Methodist church, who had been invited as a guest of the Hollis family and who, I noticed, would not look at me.
The long folding tables were covered in white paper. There was a pulled-pork line that wrapped around the coat rack and a dessert table with forty-one pies on it, which Kathy Brandt had counted twice.
A photographer from the Kansas City paper set up near the stage with a tripod. I had not been lying about that.
I wore a navy suit, simple, with my grandmother’s pearl earrings. I had considered something fancier and decided against it. I wanted to look like what I was, which was a woman from forty minutes down the road who had done some work.
I walked in with Lyle. He wore the blue shirt I had bought him for the wedding, and he held my hand a little too tight, like a man crossing a creek on a log. He had not asked me one more question since Sunday. But I had seen him on Thursday night standing in the doorway of the spare room, looking at the books on my shelf, the framed photographs of the dealerships we had saved, the diploma from a school in Chicago I had never mentioned, and I had watched something move across his face that was not anger. It was closer to awe, and closer still to grief, the particular grief of a man who understands he has been living beside a stranger because he never opened the door.
Bonnie was already seated at table nine in her good navy dress, the pearl earrings, and her best church-lady posture. Dwight sat next to her in a jacket that was a size too small. Raymond and Sherry were across from them. Raymond had a beer already.
“Well,” Bonnie said, as we sat. She looked at my suit. She looked at my hair. “Joanne. You look very nice. I hope you’re not planning to make a scene. I’ve been telling people all week you would make a scene.”
“I’m planning to eat pulled pork, Bonnie.”
“Good.” She smoothed her napkin. “Because I told the building committee how generous you’ve decided to be, and I would hate to have to explain anything awkward.”