The Wedding Supper Without a Groom

Tammy would not come all the way into the room.

She stood in the doorway of the bride’s room at the church with one hand on the frame, wearing the sage green dress I had picked out for her in June, and she looked at the carpet the whole time she said it.

“Mom says you ought to give the ring back today. Before anybody goes home.”

I was sitting on the little bench in front of the mirror. My bouquet was in my lap. I had been holding it so long the stems had left a wet place on my dress.

“All right,” I said.

“And she says.” Tammy stopped and swallowed. “She says the family is out nine thousand dollars. For the rehearsal supper at the steakhouse last night, and for the cruise. She says she expects you to make that right, since it was all done for you.”

Behind me, in the folding chair by the radiator, my Grandma June set her cane down flat on the floor. That was the only sound in the room.

“Nine thousand,” I said.

“She wrote it down.” Tammy held out a church offering envelope. On the back, in pencil, in the neat square numbers of a woman who had kept the books at the lumberyard for twenty-six years, it said: Rehearsal supper 2,100. Honeymoon cruise 6,900. Total 9,000.

The wedding dinner was not on it. She could not put that on it. My father had paid for the wedding dinner.

I took it. I don’t know why. I think because somebody handed me something, and my mother raised me to take what I was handed and say thank you.

“Thank you, Tammy.”

“Amy Jo, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to be the one. She’s out in the car and she won’t come in, and she said if I didn’t tell you she would.”

“I know you didn’t want to.”

“He’s my brother and I could wring his neck.”

“I know that too.”

She was twenty-six and her mascara was halfway down her face. I got up and hugged her, bouquet and envelope and all, and then she went back down the hall with her heels in her hand.

It was 3:41 in the afternoon. I know because the clock in the bride’s room was one of those school clocks with a red second hand, and I had been watching it since three.

Three o’clock was when I was supposed to walk.

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Here is how you find out.

Nobody tells you. At three the organist was still playing the music she plays while people are being seated, and at five after she started the same four hymns over again. My maid of honor, my cousin Beth, kept going out to check and coming back in with a different face each time.

At 3:10 she said the boys were running a little behind.

At 3:20 she didn’t say anything. Derrick’s brother Jeff, his best man, came to the door instead, in his gray suit with his boutonniere already wilting, and held out his phone like it was something that had died in his hand.

There was a text on it from Derrick. It had come in at 3:17.

I can’t. Tell her I’m sorry.

That was all of it. Six words, and he had not even sent them to me.

I called him. People have asked me since why I didn’t just get the man on the phone. I called him eleven times in twenty minutes, and it went to his voicemail every time. You cannot talk sense to a man who will not pick up.