The Wedding Supper Without a Groom

It was also on my left hand, which was wrapped around a serving spoon and wet with beef juice, in front of a hundred and forty people.

I could feel every one of them waiting to see what kind of person I was going to be.

Daddy had started up from the head table. I caught his eye and shook my head, just barely, and he stopped where he was.

I picked up a clean plate off the stack.

“You’ll have it tonight,” I said. “In its box, wiped clean, the way your mother would have kept it. I’m not going to pull it off over a steam pan and hand it to you greasy.”

Her mouth tightened. “I don’t think that’s for you to…”

“I’m serving supper right now, Lorna. There’s sixty people behind you.” I put a slice of beef on the plate, and then a second one, because she never takes enough. “There’s a place for you at the head table. It’s the same one that was always going to be yours. And there’s cake after. I’d like you to stay for it.”

She looked at the plate like I had held out a snake.

“I am not going to sit up there and…”

“Lorna.”

That was not me. That was her sister Judy, three places back in line, and not loud.

“Your whole family is in this room,” Judy said. “Every one of us. We are going to sit down and eat this girl’s supper, because she asked us to and because it’s the least we can do. You can sit with us, or you can go sit in that car by yourself. But I’ll tell you which one people are going to remember.”

Lorna stood there.

She had figured, I think, on a half-empty hall and a crying girl and a quick errand. Instead there was her sister, and her own daughter Tammy at a table with the bridesmaids, and Jeff by the wall still in his best man’s suit, looking at his mother like he was asking her for something.

If she left, she left alone, in front of all of them.

She put her keys in her purse.

She took the plate.

“Potatoes are next,” I said. “Tell Connie’s girl to give you the corner. It’s the crispy part.”

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I served until the last person was through, and then Connie took the spoon away from me and put a plate in my hands and told me she’d come after me with a dish towel if I didn’t go sit.

So I went up and sat at the head table after all.

Somebody had quietly taken away the chair with the other bow. I never did find out who. Grandma June was on my left. Daddy was on my right. And on the other side of Daddy, because it was the place that had always been hers, was Lorna, with her back as straight as a yardstick and her beef cut into small pieces she was not eating.

Nobody at that table said a cross word to her. I’ve heard this story told back to me around town with things added, and that is one of them. Daddy passed her the rolls. Grandma June asked after her tomatoes. Beth refilled her tea.