The Wedding Supper Without a Groom

“Now. There is a roast beef supper for a hundred and forty waiting over at the VFW hall. It’s hot and it’s paid for. There’s a band, and my sister made a cake you ought to see. My daughter would like you all to come and eat it with her.” He cleared his throat. “That’s the whole thing. Supper’s at five thirty. You know where the hall is.”

He looked over at me then, in case I wanted to add anything. I had not planned to. But I was looking at Derrick’s side of the church, at his Aunt Judy with her purse already in her lap and his little cousins in their clip-on ties, and I could see every one of them figuring that they were the ones who ought to slip out.

“That means both sides of the aisle,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. “Nobody in this room did anything wrong. You drove a long way and you got dressed up. Please come eat.”

For a second nobody moved.

Then old Harold Dawson stood up in the fourth row. Harold was ninety-one. He was at the Chosin Reservoir when he was nineteen, and he has sat at the same end of the bar at the post since before I was born. He was wearing a brown suit I believe he was married in.

“Well,” he said, loud, because he doesn’t hear well, “I never turned down a roast beef in my life.”

And people laughed. They laughed the way you do when you’ve been holding your breath, and then they started getting up.

My niece Emma, who was six and was my flower girl, pulled on my dress with her basket still full.

“Aunt Amy Jo? Do I still get to throw my petals?”

“You surely do,” I said. “You can throw them at the hall. You can throw them wherever you want.”

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If you’ve never been in the VFW hall in Chanute, it looks like every VFW hall you have been in. Brown paneling. A drop ceiling. The flags along the west wall and the black POW flag by the door. A kitchen with a pass-through window, and the canteen on the other side of a door that stays shut during family doings.

The post had let Daddy have it for the cleaning deposit. Thirty years of dues and fish fries will get you that.

The auxiliary ladies had been in there Friday with Beth and me, and they had done what could be done. White paper streamers swagged from the middle of the ceiling to the corners. Long tables in rows with white plastic covers and mason jars of mums from Aunt Deb’s yard. A head table across the front with twelve chairs. On the two in the middle somebody had tied white bows.

I untied one of them myself and put it in a mason jar.

Connie met me at the kitchen door. She runs the cafe out on the highway and caters out of the back of it, and she had four high school girls in black aprons and six steam pans going. She already knew. In a town of nine thousand people, news gets across four blocks faster than a bride does.

“Honey,” she said. “You tell me what you want. I can hold it, I can box it up, I can carry it to the shelter in Parsons. Your dad’s not getting a nickel back from me, because I’ve already spent it on beef, but I’ll do anything else you say.”

“I want you to open the line at five thirty like we planned.”

“You want to sit and let me bring you a plate?”