The Wedding Supper Without a Groom

“It’s yours,” he said. “I didn’t buy that supper for him. I bought it for you. You tell me what you want done with it and I’ll do it.”

I looked at myself in the mirror. Thirty-one years old. Dark hair pinned up by a girl at the salon on Main who had said I looked like my mother. A plain white dress, no beading. White satin heels that had been pinching since two o’clock.

The other choice was Pastor Dale saying something soft out front, and a hundred and forty people filing past me to their cars with their eyes down, and me lying on my old bed in this dress while four blocks away a woman named Connie scraped roast beef into trash bags.

I thought about Lorna’s envelope, too. I could have sent Tammy back out to that car with a sentence of my own. I had a few ready. But a sentence wasn’t going to feed the Hendersons, and it wasn’t going to make me feel one bit less left.

“Beth,” I said. “Hand me my bag. The blue one.”

In the blue bag were the white canvas sneakers I’d bought for the dancing. I took off the satin heels and set them side by side under the bench, neat, the way you would leave something you were not coming back for. I put on the sneakers and tied them in double knots.

Grandma June watched me do it.

“One more thing,” she said. “Don’t you send that band home.”

“Grandma.”

“I mean it. Your granddad and I got married in the parsonage parlor in Erie on a Tuesday in 1962, with the preacher’s wife and the hired man for witnesses. Then we went home and milked.” She planted the cane and got herself up out of the chair. “I have been married, and widowed, and to sixty years of other people’s weddings, and I have never one time had a wedding dance. You keep that band.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

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Pastor Dale offered to make the announcement. Daddy said no thank you, it was his to make.

We went in through the side door by the piano, the two of us, and the organist saw us and stopped in the middle of a measure. I had not known a church could get that quiet with that many people in it.

Every face turned. My fourth grade teacher. The girls from the pharmacy, where I had worked the counter for nine years. Daddy’s buddies from the post in their sport coats. On the other side of the aisle, Derrick’s people, fifty or sixty of them, aunts and cousins and men he worked with at the co-op, looking like folks who have turned up at the wrong funeral.

The front pew on his side had a gap in it where Lorna had been.

Daddy does not speak in front of people. In thirty-one years I had never heard him do it. He walked to the front, stood on the floor instead of up on the platform, and held his hands together in front of him.

“Folks,” he said. “I’m Ray. Most of you know me.”

Somebody’s baby fussed and got shushed.

“There’s not going to be a wedding today. Derrick has decided he’s not coming. That’s about all I know, and it’s about all I intend to say about it.”

There was a sound from the whole room at once. Not a word, just a breath going out.