The Invoice For My Wedding Seat
I took her hand across that table the same way she’d taken mine so many times at my own kitchen table after Walt died, and I told her she was not slipping out of anybody’s mind who mattered, and that I intended to see to it personally that she knew exactly how much she was wanted, starting now.
“You don’t need to make a fuss on my account,” she said.
“I’m not making a fuss on your account,” I told her. “I’m making it on Walt’s.”
That seemed to settle something in her, because she poured me a second cup of coffee I hadn’t asked for and started telling me, unprompted, about the dress she still had hanging in her closet from my own wedding to Walt thirty four years ago, and whether it still fit, and whether anybody would notice if it didn’t.
I did not drive to Bitsy’s house that night, and I did not drive there the next morning either, though I thought hard about it both times.
Here is the plain truth of why I didn’t simply refuse to pay and be done with it, because I have turned that question over plenty since, and I owe it an honest answer. Grant’s wedding was five weeks out. If I had called Bitsy and told her exactly where she could put her invoice, the fight that followed would not have stayed between two grown women. It would have landed, whole and ugly, right in the middle of my son’s last few weeks before his wedding, and he would have been the one standing between his mother and his future mother in law trying to hold two people he loves apart. I was not willing to be the reason Grant spent the week before his own wedding refereeing instead of celebrating. So I decided to pay what was asked of me, and find out everything else first, and only then decide what kind of a stand this actually called for.
I wrote Sloane back one line. Not Bitsy. Sloane.
I’ll send the $650 by Friday. One question first: why wasn’t Deb invited at all?
I sent it before I could talk myself into softening it, and then I did the dishes, because standing still with my hands busy has gotten me through worse nights than that one.