The Wedding Supper Without a Groom

That was harder on her than a cross word would have been. I could see it. If somebody had lit into her, she’d have had something to stand up to. Instead she had to sit there and be passed the butter by the people she had sent a bill to, in front of a hundred and forty neighbors who all knew about the envelope by then.

About halfway through, she set her fork down.

“Ray,” she said, low. “I expect you saw what I sent.”

“I did.”

“I put that cruise on my own card. Sixty-nine hundred dollars. It sails Monday out of Galveston, and they won’t give back a dime this close.” Her voice had a shake in it she was working hard to hold down. “I don’t have that, Ray. I have never in my life carried a balance. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.”

Daddy buttered a roll. He took his time.

“Lorna, I’m going to say this one time, and then I’m not going to say it again, tonight or ever.” He did not raise his voice. He has never needed to. “A supper got eaten last night by thirty-eight people, and you and I were two of them. A boat’s going to sail Monday whether anybody is on it or not. My girl didn’t order either one, and she didn’t cancel either one. You’ve brought it to the wrong house.”

Lorna looked at her plate.

“I’ve got sixty-four hundred in this room myself,” Daddy said, more gently. “I’m not sending anybody an envelope. I’m watching Harold Dawson go back for thirds. I figure I got my money’s worth.”

He set the roll on her bread plate.

That was the last time I ever heard the nine thousand dollars spoken of, by anybody.

A little later Jeff came up behind my chair and crouched down, the way you do to talk to somebody at a ball game.

“He texted me again,” he said. “You want to know or not?”

I thought about it. “Is it short?”

“Yeah.”

“Go ahead.”

Jeff read it off his phone. Derrick had left the lake and driven on down 169 to their cousin’s place in Tulsa. He said he had known since spring that he didn’t want to get married, and he had kept thinking the feeling would pass, and every week it got harder to say, until that morning it was just easier to drive.

That was the whole reason. There was no other woman and no secret. There was a man too scared to have one hard conversation in April.

“Okay,” I said.

“You want me to say anything back?”

“Tell him his mother’s here, and she’s eating.”

Jeff almost smiled. “That’ll scare him worse than anything.”

“I’m not trying to scare him. I just think he ought to know where she is.”

---

The band was four men from Parsons who played country and some old rock and roll. The leader was a heavyset fellow with a white beard, and he came and found me while the plates were being cleared, hat in his hands.

“Ma’am, we’ll do whatever you want. We can pack up and there’s no hard feelings. Or we can play quiet. We had a first dance worked up, but we can skip right on past that.”

“What was it?”

He told me. It was the old Anne Murray waltz, the one that asks for this dance for the rest of your life. Derrick had not cared what we danced to, so I had picked it, because my mother used to sing it at the sink.

“Play it,” I said.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. Play it first.”

He went back up, and they started in.