The Head Table Moved to the Kitchen

Wade stood up. I thought for a second he might say something hard, and I got ready to stop him. He only pulled his own chair out, the one with the bow on it, and turned it toward his father-in-law.

“Sit down, Glenn,” he said. “Have you eaten?”

Glenn Ashby looked at that chair like it was the kindest thing anyone had done for him in six months. It may have been. He sat. He put out his hand to me across the corner of the table and I shook it, and his hand was shaking worse than mine had on the check.

Tammy brought him a plate.

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So that is how the head table moved to the kitchen.

By a quarter to eight there were fourteen of us in there, around a steel prep table meant for six, eating off our laps and the counter and an upturned milk crate. Lois was telling Cody about threshing dinners in 1951, when her mother fed twenty-two men at noon on a wood range, and Cody was listening with his whole face.

And through the pass-through window, the long way down the hall, I could see the head table.

It had a white cloth and a row of mason jars with sunflowers in them and a row of little cards, every one still standing in its place. Bride. Groom. Best Man. Maid of Honor. Father of the Bride.

And one woman in champagne satin, sitting in the middle of it, alone.

She was not eating. She had her hands folded on the cloth. In front of her, 180 people were finishing their supper, and every one of them had watched the groom carry his chair out, and then the bride, and then the rest, and it does not take a small town long to work out a thing like that. Nobody was being unkind to her. Nobody went near her either. People kept their eyes on their plates, the way my son had.

I would be lying if I said I felt nothing at that sight. For a moment it was satisfying.

It did not last, and I am glad. The longer I looked, the more I saw a woman who had been frightened since March, in a dress she could not afford, on the day she had worked a year for, with nobody at her table.

I know something about sitting alone. I did seven years of it.

The disc jockey came on and said it was time to cut the cake. The whole kitchen got up at once, laughing, chairs scraping, bridesmaids hunting for shoes. Wade and Emily went out hand in hand, and the hall clapped for them, a little louder than a hall claps for a cake.

I stayed where I was until they had cut it and Tammy’s girls had started slicing. Then I went out and took two plates off the cake table. Two forks.

I walked the length of that hall for the second time that night. This time people watched me do it.

I set one plate down in front of Cynthia Ashby. I set the other in front of the chair beside her, and I sat.

She did not look at me. Her chin was trembling and she was holding it still by force.

“I don’t want that,” she said.

“It’s your daughter’s wedding cake. Eat a bite of it. You’ll be sorry in twenty years if you don’t.”

She was quiet a long time.

“Glenn told you,” she said.

“He told the whole kitchen. Your mother was there.”

She closed her eyes.