The Head Table Moved to the Kitchen

I had just set my plate down when Cynthia Ashby stood up beside me.

It was a good plate. Brisket with the bark still on it, cheesy potatoes, green beans cooked with bacon, one soft roll. The head table had gone through the line first, the way it is done, and behind us the rest of the hall was only starting to get up, table by table, 180 people in their good clothes shuffling toward the buffet.

The hall was the 4-H building at our county fairgrounds. Anybody from central Iowa knows the kind. Cinder block painted cream, a concrete floor that has seen thirty years of pie auctions and rabbit judging, a kitchen at the north end with a pass-through window and a roll-up shutter. Emily’s bridesmaids had spent all Friday stringing lights across the rafters, and I will say it plainly, they had made that old building beautiful.

It was the last Saturday in September, and half the men in the room had left a combine sitting in a field to be there.

I reached for my fork.

Cynthia picked up my place card.

She did it with two fingers, the way you would lift a hair off a cake. She was fifty-eight, four years older than me, with a blonde bob that did not move and a strand of pearls and a champagne satin dress that had cost more than my car payment. I was in a plain navy dress from the rack in Ames, and the small white corsage my son had pinned on me himself that morning with hands that shook.

She held the card up between us and read it. Mother of the Groom, in somebody’s nice slanted handwriting.

Then she looked at me.

“This table is for the people who paid for this wedding.”

She did not whisper it. She did not shout it either. She said it in the voice a woman uses to tell a waitress the order is wrong.

Kim, the maid of honor, stopped with her water glass halfway up. Tim, my son’s best man, turned his whole head. The two bridesmaids at the far end went still.

And my son heard it. He was two chairs down from me, in the gray suit we had picked out together at the men’s store in Marshalltown, with an empty chair on his other side where his bride should have been.

Wade looked down at his plate.

I want to be fair about that, because I have thought about it more than any other second of that day. He was twenty-seven years old and four hours married. Emily had been called to the back hallway ten minutes before, because the bustle on her dress had let go and two aunts with safety pins were working on it. So he was sitting there alone between his new wife’s mother and his own, and he did not know yet which woman he was allowed to cross.

That hurt worse than the card.

I could have said a number of things. I have a tongue. Twenty-six years of running a school kitchen will give a woman a tongue, and a voice that carries over two hundred second graders besides.

I could have said that I had offered, back in April, to cook this entire supper myself. That I had stood in Cynthia’s own front room with a notebook and told her the ladies from my kitchen and I could feed two hundred people roast beef and real mashed potatoes for the cost of the groceries, somewhere around $2,500, and that it would be my gift to the kids. I could have said what she answered. “My daughter is not having a lunch-line wedding, Carla.”