The Backyard Wedding Under the Cottonwood

Brittany

I ran into Brittany in August at the Hy-Vee in Watertown. I was there to order the sheet cakes, and she was in the bakery line ahead of me with a cart full of sparkling water and salad kits. She saw me before I could pretend to look at the doughnuts.

“Lori,” she said.

“Brittany.”

We stood there. The bakery girl was boxing up somebody’s birthday cake with a fire truck on it. I could feel the whole store listening, even though nobody was.

“I heard you’re doing it at your house,” she said.

“We are.”

She nodded. Her hands were tight on the cart handle. She had very nice nails, a pale pink, and she was turning her wedding ring around and around with her thumb.

“I didn’t mean for it to go like that,” she said. “With the money. I just.” She stopped. “Do you know what it’s like to walk into a room where everybody already knows who the first wife is? Every Christmas. Every graduation. Every time somebody at the dealership says Abby’s name, they look at me like I’m the substitute teacher.”

I did not know what to say to that. I had spent six years thinking of Brittany as the woman who got the part of Greg I never did, the part that came home. It had not crossed my mind that she might be thinking the same thing in reverse.

“I just wanted one day where I wasn’t second,” she said. “That’s all. I know how it sounded.”

“It sounded like you wanted my daughter to pick,” I said. I said it quietly. “She’s been picking between us her whole life. She was tired.”

Brittany looked down at her cart. “Yeah,” she said. “I know that now.”

The bakery girl called my name. I stepped up and ordered three sheet cakes, white with raspberry filling, for the Saturday after Labor Day. When I turned around, Brittany had already left the line, and her cart was sitting there by the doughnuts with the sparkling water still in it.

I thought about her the whole drive home. I did not like her any better. But I understood her a little, and that was harder.

The invitation

Abby addressed her invitations at my kitchen table in July. She bought plain cream cards at the craft store and printed them herself at the dental office after hours, with her boss’s permission. They said the date and my address and “Ceremony at six thirty, supper to follow, dress for the yard.”

She addressed one to her father. Just to him, “Mr. Greg Haugen.” She did not put “and guest” and she did not put Brittany’s name. She sat with the pen over it for a long time.

“Is that mean?” she asked me. “Not putting her on it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you want it to say?”

She thought about it. Then she turned the card over and wrote one line on the back, in her neat hygienist handwriting that looks like it belongs on a chart.

Would you still walk me down the aisle?

She looked at it for a while. Then she put it in the envelope and licked it shut before she could change her mind. “The aisle is going to be grass, Mom,” she said. “Between Pastor Dahl’s chairs. Is that dumb?”

“No,” I said. “It’s the best aisle in town.”

The RSVP card came back in August. It had a check mark in the “will attend” box. Where it said “number attending,” there was nothing. No number. No note on the back. Just Greg’s check mark, heavy, the way he signs everything.

Abby put it on my refrigerator under a magnet from the Corn Palace. Neither of us said what we were both thinking. We did not know if that check mark meant one person, or two, or that he was just being polite and would not come at all.