The Wedding Loan I Was Left Holding

Amber wanted a simple wedding. She told me that herself, sitting at this same table, maybe two months after we started planning. She wanted the Lutheran church where she was baptized and a potluck reception in the fellowship hall, the kind of wedding her father and I had, two hundred dollars for flowers and a cake from the Hy Vee bakery and dancing to somebody’s stereo.

But Tyler’s mother, Sue, had other ideas. Sue Rude has never in her life done a small version of anything. She and Dan own the implement dealership and a good piece of land besides, and when she found out Amber was thinking of the church basement, she sat the two of them down and told them a wedding like that would embarrass the family, that people would talk, that there was a venue out by Saylorville Lake that did “the most beautiful tented receptions,” and that Dan would be glad to help out if the Croy side could meet them partway.

I remember sitting at Sue’s kitchen table, the big one with the leaf put in for company, while she laid out a binder of photographs from the lake venue, tents and string lights and a dance floor set out over the water on a dock. “Amber deserves to be a princess for one day,” Sue said, sliding a brochure toward me like she was selling me something I had already agreed to buy. “And frankly, Lanette, people are going to be watching. Dan’s whole side of the family, the people from the dealership. We can’t very well do a potluck in a church basement.”

I told her the church basement was good enough for my own wedding and Ron’s, and that nobody who mattered had ever once asked me what the cake cost. Sue smiled the way she smiles when she has already decided a conversation is over. “Of course,” she said, “but times are different now, and Dan would really like to help make this special for them. We just need everybody pulling their share.”

Amber did not say much that night. She sat between her future mother in law and me with her hands in her lap, and I understood, watching her, that she had already lost this argument before I ever got invited to it, and that the kindest thing I could do for my daughter was not fight a war she had already surrendered, but make sure the surrender did not cost her anything she could not afford. That is the thought, I will tell you honestly, that walked me into the bank two weeks later.

Partway turned out to mean thirty five thousand dollars, split in theory, paid for in practice by a personal loan that Amber and Tyler could not get approved on their own because Tyler had two years left on a truck loan and Amber had just started her job at the clinic and didn’t have the credit history yet. The bank wanted a co-signer with a clean history and equity behind her.