The Wedding Supper Without a Groom

Nobody got up, of course. A hundred and forty people sat there with their coffee and looked at an empty square of linoleum with a waltz going over the top of it. For about eight bars I thought I had made a real mistake.

Then I heard the cane.

Grandma June was getting up. She did not ask anybody for help. She pushed her chair back, squared herself, and came around the end of the head table one step at a time in her lavender dress with the pearl buttons. She stopped in front of me and held out her hand, palm up, the way a boy would have in 1958.

“I believe this is mine,” she said.

I took her hand. We walked out onto that floor, eighty-four and thirty-one, a cane and a pair of canvas sneakers, and she hung the cane over her wrist and put her other hand on my shoulder.

She could not really waltz anymore. We swayed. That was all we did. She smelled like Jergens and the peppermints she keeps in her pocketbook.

“I’m sorry it’s just me, Grandma,” I said.

“Hush. I’ve waited sixty years for this and I’m not going to have it apologized over.”

“I mean for you. I’m sorry your dance had to be this one.”

She leaned back so she could see my face. Her eyes were wet but her voice wasn’t.

“Amy Jo, listen to me. I buried a husband and a daughter-in-law and a baby boy you never knew about, who’d have been your uncle. I know what a bad day is. A bad day is one where there’s nobody to feed and nobody to dance with.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Look around this room, sugar. This is not a bad day. This is a hard day. They’re not the same thing, and when you’re my age you’ll know the difference by the sound.”

That was when I finally cried. Right there in the middle of the floor, with my forehead down on my grandmother’s shoulder and her patting my back in time to the steel guitar.

I heard a chair scrape. Then another.

When I got my head up, Daddy was standing at the edge of the floor with his hand out to his sister Deb. Harold Dawson had got hold of one of the auxiliary ladies. Derrick’s Aunt Judy and her husband were out there. Emma was dancing by herself, turning in circles, throwing the last of her petals straight up so they came down on her own head.

By the end of the song there was not room to swing your arm.

When it finished, Daddy cut in. He’s no dancer either. He stepped on my sneaker twice and said “sorry” both times, and at the end he held on a few seconds longer than the music.

“Your mother,” he said, and then he had to stop and start over. “Your mother would’ve done exactly what you did today. Spoon and all.”

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Aunt Deb’s cake was three tiers, white, with real mums around the bottom. She had already slipped the little bride and groom off the top and put them in her purse before anybody could see. I love her for that.

I cut it myself, the way you’d cut any cake, and Connie’s girls started plating.

I took the first piece up to the head table.

Lorna was sitting there by herself. Everybody else was out on the floor or in the cake line. She had her hands flat on the tablecloth on either side of her plate, and she was crying the way a careful woman cries, without any sound and without wiping at it, just letting it run down and drip off her chin onto that navy jacket.