The Wedding Supper Without a Groom

I set the cake down in front of her and I sat in Daddy’s chair.

The band was playing something fast, and Harold Dawson was doing a thing with his elbows.

“He didn’t tell me either,” Lorna said.

“I figured.”

“I pressed his shirt this morning. I stood in my kitchen at seven o’clock and pressed his shirt and hung it on the door, and he drank his coffee and watched me do it.” She pulled in a breath. “He kissed me on the head when he left. He said, see you at the church, Mom.”

I hadn’t known that part. I felt it land somewhere under my ribs.

“I sat in that front pew for forty minutes with everybody I know looking at the back of my head,” she said. “And when Jeff showed me that phone I thought I would die of it. I couldn’t go to you. I couldn’t look at you. So I went and sat in the car, and I got out a pencil.”

She turned to me then. Her whole face was coming apart.

“That’s what I do, Amy Jo. Twenty-six years. When something’s gone wrong, I add it up, because a column of figures will at least hold still. I added up the only part I knew how to add, and I sent my daughter in with it, to a girl in her wedding dress.” She pressed her lips together until they went white. “I have been ashamed of my son for three hours. I am going to be ashamed of myself a good deal longer than that.”

I could have let her sit in it. There was a part of me that wanted to. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say “well, you should be” and leave her to her cake.

But I kept thinking about that shirt on the door.

He had done it to her too. He let his own mother iron for him and drive to the church and sit down in the front pew in a dress she’d bought for it. Then he let her find out from a telephone, in front of her sister and her preacher and everyone she knew. I at least had my father and my grandmother in the room with me. She’d had a parked car.

“Lorna,” I said. “You sat with me in Wichita.”

She shook her head. “Don’t.”

“Six nights. You brought me a toothbrush. You are not going to be the envelope to me. I’ve got four years of you to pick from, and I get to pick.”

She put her hand over her mouth.

I reached down into the blue bag, which Beth had set under the table for me. In the side pocket was the little box. It was the original, dark green leather gone soft at the corners, with the name of a jeweler in Independence that closed before I was born. I’d carried it to the church that morning because you move your engagement ring to your right hand for the ceremony, and I hadn’t trusted myself not to lose it.

I had washed my hands at the kitchen sink with Connie’s dish soap. I took the ring off. It left a pale stripe.

I wiped it with a clean corner of my napkin, the way I’d told her I would. I set it in the slot, and closed the lid, and slid the box across the white plastic tablecloth until it touched her fingers.