The Wedding Supper Without a Groom

“No. I want a spoon.”

I only knew I could not sit up at that head table next to an empty chair with a bow on it and be looked at. If a hundred and forty people were going to look at me, and they were, I wanted something in my hands. I wanted to hand each one of them a hot plate.

Connie tied an apron around my waist over the wedding dress and gave me the long spoon for the beef.

So that’s where I was at 5:30. At the head of the buffet line in a white dress and sneakers, with au jus up to my wrist.

Harold Dawson was first, naturally. He had been standing by the plates since 5:15.

“Give me an end piece if you’ve got it,” he said.

“I’ve got it.”

I laid it on his plate and handed it across. He did not move along. He stood there holding that plate in both hands, and he looked at me with those pale old eyes.

“I got a letter in Korea,” he said. “Winter of ’51. Girl I’d been writing to since basic. She’d married a fella from Fredonia.” He nodded slowly. “Thought it’d kill me. I met Dorothy at a box supper the year I got home. We had fifty-eight years.”

“Thank you, Harold.”

“I’m just telling you what happened.” And he shuffled on down toward the potatoes.

They came through like that for forty minutes. The pharmacy girls, who hugged me across the steam pans and got gravy on their sleeves. Daddy’s friends, who couldn’t think of anything to say and so said “looks good” about the beef. Derrick’s Aunt Judy, who took my free hand and held it against her cheek for a second and could not say anything at all.

Emma threw petals at every one of them.

And at about ten till six, with sixty people still in line, the door by the POW flag opened and Lorna came in.

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She had changed her shoes too, I noticed. She’d had on navy heels at the church and now she had on flats. She was still in the navy dress with the jacket, the one she and I had driven to Joplin together to find, and she had her purse on her arm and her car keys in her hand.

She did not look around. She came straight up the side of the room along the paneling, past the whole line.

The band wasn’t playing yet. So when the talk died, table by table, as people saw her, there wasn’t anything to cover it.

She stopped across the steam table from me.

Lorna was sixty-two. She had been a widow for eight years. She is a small, upright, careful woman who irons her pillowcases, and in the four years I’d gone with her son she had never once been unkind to me. That was the thing I couldn’t get past, standing there. She had taught me her mother’s noodle recipe. She had sat with me at the hospital in Wichita the week my own mother died, when Derrick had to work.

“Amy Jo,” she said.

“Lorna.”

“I’ll take the ring now. I’d as soon not make a second trip.”

She said it quietly. But it was a quiet room.

The ring was her mother’s. A small round diamond in a yellow gold setting from 1948. Derrick hadn’t bought it. She had taken it out of her own jewelry box and given it to him to give to me, and she had cried doing it. I was never going to keep that ring. There was no version of that day where I kept it.