The Invitations in the Mop Bucket
Joanne was waiting for every one of those questions. She had her answers pressed and hung.
So I didn’t ask them.
“Thank you for letting me know,” I said.
Her smile held, but something behind it shifted, the way a deer’s ears turn before the rest of it moves.
“Well,” she said. “I thought you’d want to see for yourself.”
“Yes ma’am. I did.”
“I can throw them out for you. No sense you carrying that mess home.”
“I’ll take this one,” I said. “You can do what you want with the rest.”
I walked out through her kitchen with one dripping envelope held flat in both hands, past the white counters and the bowl of wax pears, out to my car in the caliche drive. I set the envelope on the passenger seat on top of my clinic jacket.
Then I sat there with the engine off and both hands on the wheel and did not cry, which surprised me.
She was watching from the kitchen window. I could see the pink of her blouse.
I started the car.
I should say what it was about, because it was never about a box of invitations.
It was about the church.
I grew up at Cedar Fork Baptist, eleven miles out a county road, past two cattle guards and a low water crossing. It is a white frame building with a tin roof and a hundred and twenty seats if you count the folding chairs. My granddaddy helped pour the foundation. My parents were married there. I was baptized in the stock tank behind it when I was nine, in July, with horseflies.
Joanne had chaired the altar guild at the big brick Methodist church in town for nineteen years. It has a pipe organ and a carpeted aisle long enough to do a train justice. She had been planning Ian’s wedding in that aisle since he was in junior high, and she had never once pictured a tin roof.
When we told her in the spring where it would be, she set down her fork and said, “That little church out past the cattle guard? Kelsey, honey, where will people park?”
“In the pasture,” I said. “Same as always.”
She laughed like I’d made a joke.
She brought it up all summer. In August she offered to pay for the flowers if we would “just consider” moving it, and Ian told her, gently, the way he tells her everything, that it was settled.
After that she quit bringing it up. I thought she had made her peace.
She had just quit talking.
And I should say what those invitations cost, because that mattered too. I work the front desk at the vet clinic. Ian is a lineman for the electric co-op, and in August his truck’s transmission had gone out and taken $2,300 with it. We had put down the deposit on the tent and the tables. My dress was paid off in four installments.
The invitations, the envelopes and the stamps had come to $612. I had the receipt in my Bible, I don’t know why. We did not have another $612. We did not have another sixty.
I drove home with that one envelope riding beside me like a passenger.
At the house I laid a clean dish towel on the kitchen table. I opened the envelope as carefully as I have ever done anything and slid the invitation out. The card was heavy cream stock with our names in raised brown letters, and the water had left a tide line across it like the ring on a creek bank after a rise.