The Invoice For My Wedding Seat

I told her I was sorry, and I meant it, and I got off that call and sat with my hand flat on the kitchen table for longer than I’d like to admit.

Then I called Carl himself, Walt’s brother, a man who has driven two hours each way every single year to help me split and stack a winter’s worth of firewood since Walt passed, because he will not let his brother’s widow freeze and will not take a dime for the gas.

Carl and his wife Donna had gotten nothing either. No invoice, no invitation, no mention.

By the time I called Walt’s mother, Alma, who at eighty one still lives on her own two streets over from me and has not missed a single holiday at my table in all the years I’ve known her, I already knew what she was going to say, and she said it anyway, soft, the way she says most things now.

“I didn’t want to ask,” Alma told me. “I thought maybe an old woman slips a mind at a busy time like this. I wasn’t going to make trouble over it.”

I sat in my kitchen that night with a short list growing longer with every call, Walt’s own mother, Walt’s own brother and his wife, Walt’s own niece, every one of them family by blood or by forty years of showing up, and not one of them on the guest list, while I had been handed an itemized bill for the privilege of attending, and somewhere underneath all of it I understood exactly what had happened without anyone having said it to me directly yet.

Somebody had needed room, and money, and had decided that Walt’s side of the family was the cheapest place to find both.

I drove over to see Alma the next morning before my shift at the library, because a voice on the phone can hide more than it shows, and I wanted to see her face. She had her coffee pot going and her Bible open on the kitchen table the way it always is, and when I asked her straight out if it had hurt her feelings, not getting asked, she folded her hands the way she does in church and took a long moment before she answered.

“I buried a husband and a son in this town,” she said. “I have been to more weddings in this family than I can count on both hands, Paulette, and I never once needed to be the center of any of them. But I’ll tell you plain, it stung more than I let on when I heard it through the grapevine instead of a card in the mail. A person gets to a certain age and starts to wonder if she’s slipping out of people’s minds before she’s even gone.”