The Backyard Wedding Under the Cottonwood

What a wedding costs

I am a school secretary at the elementary. I have been for twenty-two years. I know how to make a budget, and I know what a dollar does in this town. Tanner knows math the way some men know engines. Between the two of us, that legal pad never stood a chance.

We started with what Abby wanted, not what a wedding is supposed to have. It was a short list. Outside. At home. Pastor Dahl. Her uncle Mike cooking, because his pulled pork is what she asks for every birthday.

“And the dress,” she said. “I want a dress I pick off a rack, in a store, with you. Not one that comes in eight months from somewhere in New York.”

“Where’s home?” Tanner asked. “Your place or here?”

Abby looked out the dark kitchen window toward the backyard, toward the cottonwood. “Here,” she said.

So we wrote it down. The dress, off the rack from the bridal shop in Sioux Falls. Food for a hundred and ten, Mike at the grill: pork shoulders, brats, cheesy potatoes, coleslaw, buns.

Tanner priced the meat at the locker in town and came back with eight hundred and sixty dollars.

Sheet cakes from the Hy-Vee bakery, white with raspberry filling, because Abby said nobody actually likes fondant, they just like pictures of it. Two hundred and forty dollars. Flowers from the farmers market, the woman who grows zinnias and dahlias out by the county line. A hundred and eighty.

The marriage license from the courthouse was forty dollars. Pastor Dahl would not hear of an honorarium, but we wrote down a hundred and fifty anyway, because I was raised that you pay the pastor whether he lets you or not, and you put it in the offering plate if he won’t take it in his hand.

Then the things a backyard doesn’t have. A rented tent for the food, in case of weather. Beer and pop. Coffee, because this is South Dakota and half the guests would be Lutherans over sixty. Paper plates, napkins, a hundred and ten forks. Tanner added it all up twice, then a third time out loud.

“Two thousand nine hundred,” he said. He underlined it twice. “Give or take a bag of ice.”

Abby put her hand flat on the legal pad. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Tanner said. “Eighteen thousand was for the room. We have a room.” He pointed out the window.

I paid for it out of my savings. Abby and Tanner put in eight hundred of their own, and I let them, because she needed it to be hers too. It was more money than I usually spend in a year on anything that is not the house or the car. It was the best money I ever spent.

The chairs

I called the church office on a Tuesday, and Pastor Dahl called me back himself. I explained what we were doing and asked if we could rent some of the folding chairs from the fellowship hall.

“Rent?” he said. “Lori, those chairs have sat through every funeral in this town since 1974. They have earned a wedding. Take as many as you need. Bring them back by Sunday school.”

So the Thursday before the wedding, Tanner and my brother Mike took both their pickups to the church and loaded a hundred and twenty tan metal chairs with the church’s name stenciled on the back. Every one of them was a little wobbly in its own way.

Mike is two years older than me and has grilled for every family event since he was fifteen, on a smoker he built himself out of an old propane tank. When I told him about Greg’s phone call, he set his coffee down very carefully.

“Well, that’s a heck of a thing,” he said. That is the most he has said about my ex husband in seventeen years.

Then he said, “Pork shoulders. How many people?”