The Invoice For My Wedding Seat
It was not a grand speech. It did not need to be. I have found, in fifty seven years, that the apologies that stick are the plain ones, said once, and meant.
Alma reached over and took my hand under the table right about then, her grip still strong for eighty one, and leaned in close enough that only I could hear her.
“Walt would have liked that boy’s nerve,” she said.
I had to look hard at my casserole dish for a minute after that.
Bitsy did refund the money, by wire transfer the next morning, with a short note that said only, for the chair you should never have been billed for in the first place. I did not gloat over it, and I did not bring it up again at the wedding, because Brenda from church has always told me a thing set right does not need to be mentioned twice to count.
She also, I found out later from Sloane, personally called four of her own real estate clients that week and asked, as gently as she knew how, whether they would mind a smaller table assignment so that family could sit together. Two of them minded. Bitsy let them mind, and left the seating as Grant had set it.
Sloane told me something else, too, a few days after the rehearsal, sitting on my porch with a glass of the sweet tea she’d started asking for every time she visited. “My mom grew up without much,” she said. “Grandpa Marsh lost the family store when she was fourteen, and she has spent every year since trying to make sure nobody ever looks at her the way people looked at her family back then. I’m not saying that makes it right. I’m saying I understand now why she thought a big, impressive guest list mattered more than it should have. I don’t want to be the next version of her.”
I told Sloane that was about the most honest thing anybody in this whole business had said to me, Bitsy included, and that a woman who can see that clearly at twenty six was going to be just fine running a household of her own.