The Invoice For My Wedding Seat
“We’ll see what we can do,” Bitsy said, the same five words she used for everything that engagement, and patted Sloane’s hand like she was humoring a child who wanted a pony.
By Christmas the guest count had climbed past two hundred, and Sloane had stopped bringing up the honeymoon.
I noticed, early, that the guest list kept shrinking on one side and not the other. I didn’t say anything. It is not my place to run another family’s wedding, even my own son’s, and I have buried enough of my own opinions over the years to know how to keep doing it. Walt used to say I could out wait a glacier when I set my mind to it, and most of that winter and spring I set my mind to waiting, trusting that Grant and Sloane would sort their own wedding the way young couples have to learn to sort things, by living with a mother in law’s opinions long enough to figure out which ones to keep.
The invoice changed that.
I did not call Sloane first. I want to be honest about the order of things, because Walt used to tell me I think faster than I talk, and that night I thought for a long while before I did either.
I called my sister Jan.
“Did you get a bill for your seat,” I asked her, no greeting, because Jan and I have never needed one.
She laughed, the way you laugh at something you assume is a joke. Then she went quiet, because I wasn’t laughing back.
“I got something,” she said slowly. “I thought it was odd, but I figured that’s just how some of these younger weddings go now, everybody chips in. I sent my two hundred without thinking much of it.”
Two hundred for Jan, six hundred fifty for me, and I did not yet understand why the gap, though I would by the end of that week.
Then I called my cousin Deb.
Deb is Walt’s brother Carl’s girl, my husband’s niece by blood, close enough to Grant growing up that the two of them spent every Fourth of July of their childhood setting off bottle rockets in Walt’s mother’s gravel driveway until somebody’s mother made them stop.
“Deb,” I said, “did you get an invoice for the wedding?”
There was a pause longer than Jan’s had been.
“Paulette,” she said, “I didn’t get an invitation.”
I had to sit down for that one, though I was already sitting.
“At all?” I said.
“At all,” she said. “I figured maybe it got lost, or maybe things were tight on space, and I didn’t want to make it about me calling and asking why I wasn’t invited to my own cousin’s wedding. I was going to just let it go.”