The Wedding Supper Without a Groom

Jeff did better. He kept dialing, and inside the hour Derrick answered him, one time. He was sitting in his truck out at the lake, the place he went to fish. He was not hurt and he was not in a ditch. He would not come. Then he hung up on his own brother and shut the phone off.

So that was where things stood when his mother sent her envelope in.

A hundred and forty people in the sanctuary. An organist on her third trip through the same four hymns. A groom in a pickup at the lake. And a bill.

---

Daddy came in next. He must have passed Tammy in the hall.

My father is Ray. He was sixty-six that fall. He worked maintenance at the cement plant for thirty-one years, and he drove a fuel tanker in the Gulf in 1991. He is not a talker. He had on the first new suit he’d bought since my mother’s funeral, charcoal, and he had let Beth pin a rose on it, and he looked like a man who had been standing at the back of a church for forty minutes ready to walk his daughter down the aisle, because that is what he was.

He looked at the envelope in my hand.

“What’s that?”

I gave it to him. He read it the way he reads everything, slow, with his chin tucked. Then he read it again.

“Lorna sent this.”

“She sent Tammy with it.”

“Today.”

“Just now.”

He folded the envelope once and put it in his inside coat pocket. His hand was not quite steady doing it.

“Jeff says he’s out at the lake,” Daddy said. “I can be in the truck in two minutes.”

“And do what?”

“I’d think of something on the way.”

“Daddy.”

“I would.”

“I know you would. That’s why you’re not going.” I sat back down on the bench because my knees had quit. “If you have to go fetch a man and bring him back, I don’t want what you’d be bringing.”

He stood there a while. I could see him wanting to argue and not finding the place to start.

Then Grandma June spoke up from her chair.

“Raymond. What’s Connie got in the warmers over at the hall?”

Daddy turned around. “What?”

“The supper. What did you buy?”

“Roast beef. Cheesy potatoes, green beans, slaw, rolls.” He said it like a man reading off a parts list. “A hundred and forty plates at thirty-five dollars. She put the beef in at six this morning.”

“And the band?”

“Fifteen hundred. They’re already set up. I saw their trailer when I drove by at noon.”

“So that’s what,” Grandma said. “Sixty-four hundred dollars?”

“Yes ma’am. Sixty-four hundred.”

“Paid?”

“Paid Tuesday.”

Grandma June was eighty-four. She has a hip that came from Wichita and a cane she mostly uses to point with. She pointed it at me.

“Then there’s a hot supper for a hundred and forty people sitting four blocks from here, bought and paid for by your father, and a hundred and forty people in that sanctuary who put on their good clothes and drove in from all over creation and have not had a bite since noon.” She let that sit. “Your cousin Mark came from Amarillo. The Hendersons are in their eighties and drove up from Coffeyville. I don’t know what you want to do, sugar. But I know what’s going to waste if you do nothing.”