The Head Table Moved to the Kitchen

“You don’t owe me that, Lois.”

“I am eighty-four. I will decide what I owe.” She patted my hand. “Is there any more of that brisket?”

There was. Dale brought it to her himself.

---

Glenn Ashby came last.

I learned afterward that when his wife lifted my card he had been clear across the hall, carrying a plate to his mother-in-law and then standing in the bar line for her glass of wine. He had not seen it and nobody had told him. The first he knew, half the head table was gone and his wife was sitting very straight with her hands in her lap.

He had gone looking for Dale to find out what was wrong with the bill. He found him by the service door.

“I’ll make it right with you tonight,” Glenn told him. “I’ll write you a check on the house account.”

“It’s been taken care of,” Dale said.

“By who?”

Dale said nothing. He kept his word to me all the way down. But he is not an actor, and he looked at the kitchen door.

Glenn came in without a plate. He is a tall, stooped man of sixty, with big hands. He stood inside the door, and the talk at the prep table died down a little at a time until the only sound was the radio.

“Mrs. Hoyt,” he said. “Could I speak to you?”

“You can speak to me right here, Glenn. And it’s Carla. Our children are married.”

He nodded. He looked at his daughter, and at his mother-in-law, and at the place card standing by my plate.

“I got let go in March,” he said.

Emily’s head came up. “Dad?”

“The dealership sold to that outfit from Des Moines and they brought their own parts manager. Twenty-three years.” He kept his eyes on me, because I think he could not look at her. “I’ve been driving a propane route since May. It’s about half. Your mother and I agreed we wouldn’t tell you until after the wedding. She did not want you cutting anything.”

Nobody moved.

“I thought the caterer was paid out of my severance. That was the plan. I found out ten minutes ago the severance went to the dress and the photographer and the flowers, and the rest was going on the card, and the card had a limit she figured she was under.” He swallowed. “She wasn’t. The photographer ran his balance this morning.”

So that was where the money had gone. It was not wickedness, just pride and arithmetic. A woman had promised her only daughter a certain kind of day, and then the ground went out from under her in March, and she had decided that nobody would ever know it.

I thought of that front room in April. I had taken her for a snob. She had been afraid.

“Glenn,” I said. “I’m sorry about your job. That’s a hard thing at sixty.”

“I am not here for sympathy,” he said. “I’m here to tell you that you will have every dollar of that back by Christmas. Every dollar. I have a bass boat I don’t need and a pickup that’s newer than it has to be. I’ll shake on it in front of my daughter.”

“You don’t need to sell your boat.”

“I do, though.” He said it simply. “A man doesn’t let a widow pay for his daughter’s wedding out of her roof and then go fishing.”