The Invoice For My Wedding Seat
Six hundred and fifty dollars is not an amount I keep sitting around. It is an amount I would have had to pull, dollar by dollar, out of the furnace fund, the one I have been building since October because the unit in that house is older than Grant is.
I read the email a third time, hoping some word in it would soften on a third pass. It did not. At the bottom, under Bitsy’s typed name, was one line that I have turned over in my head more times than the rest of the invoice combined.
We’re asking everyone to pitch in a little so this day can be everything Sloane deserves.
Everyone. I wondered right then, sitting there with Grant’s twenty two year old grin looking down at me, exactly who everyone was.
Sloane came into our lives a year and a half ago, and for most of that time I liked her plainly and without reservation. She is twenty six, soft spoken, works dental hygiene two towns over, and the first time she came to Sunday dinner she brought a pie she’d made herself, a little lopsided on one side, and admitted right off that she’d never made a lattice crust before and this one had fought her the whole way. I thought, there is a girl who tells the truth about her pie. I liked her for it.
Her mother is a different animal, and I say that without much venom, because Bitsy Marsh has never once been unkind to my face. Bitsy sells real estate on the nicer side of the county and sits on two committees in town that I know of and probably three I don’t, and from the very first engagement dinner it was clear whose wedding this was actually going to be. Sloane would float an idea, a simple one, a backyard, a potluck, something her and Grant’s friends could afford to be part of without feeling strange about it, and Bitsy would smile and say, well, let’s just see what we can do, honey, and three weeks later there would be a venue booked and a florist retained and neither Sloane nor Grant would remember exactly agreeing to either one.
I remember the engagement dinner clear as anything, because it was the first time I saw how the two of them worked as a pair. We were at the Marsh house, a nice brick place on the good side of town with a dining room table longer than my whole kitchen, and Sloane said, halfway through dessert, that she thought a hundred guests was plenty, maybe less, and that she’d rather spend the money on a honeymoon than on centerpieces nobody would remember by Monday.