The Man at the Hired Help Table
Then a chair scraped behind me.
It was Jeff, my best man, who had been my roommate for four years of college and who has never in his life been good at standing still while something wrong is happening. He had his jacket off before he got to the table. He folded it over his arm and put it on the chair on the other side of my father and sat down on the end.
Travis came next, my cousin, who is six foot four and has to turn sideways to fit through most doors.
Nobody said one word. They just began to carry chairs. A groomsman in shirtsleeves is a funny thing to see when he is dragging a chair to a vendor table, but nobody was laughing.
Nina came down the middle of the barn in her long dress with her bridesmaids behind her. She did not look at Ms. Vance either. She walked straight up to my father and kissed him on the cheek, right on the creased collar.
“Hi, Dad,” she said. She had been calling him that since March. “I’m going to sit by you, if that’s all right.”
My father said, “I’d be honored.” Then he cleared his throat and looked at the table.
Nina took the cloth napkin off her lap, wrapped it around ice from the tea pitcher, and laid it over his split knuckles without asking. He let her.
Ms. Vance reached us about thirty seconds later. She was moving fast, with her headset crooked and her clipboard raised like a shield.
“Wesley. Nina. Please. I think there is a misunderstanding.” She lowered her voice and glanced at the room. “Dinner service is staged by table number. The kitchen has a plan. If the family sits down at fourteen, I can’t get the plates to the right tables in the right order, and then the toasts get out of order, and the cake…”
“Then we’ll be served last,” I said. I kept my voice level and low. I was not going to give anybody in that room a show. “He doesn’t mind. Neither do I.”
“Wesley, this is the vendor table. The vendors…”
“I know what it is.”
She stopped. She looked at me, and then she looked at the man sitting between her groom and her bride, and I watched her go through it. Slowly, a person doing a long sum. The pressed shirt. The comb lines. The stiff, polite way he sat. A name on her clipboard.
“Mr. Trombley?” she said. It came out small.
“Yes, ma’am,” said my father. “Earl.”
“Oh.” She put a hand to her headset. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I was told you would be wearing a suit. I thought…” She looked around for something to blame and found nothing. “I thought you were with the crew.”
“I am, a little,” my father said, mildly. “I was.”
She did not know what that meant. I did not either. But her face changed. The last of her color went somewhere else, and she stood there with her mouth open a little and the whole barn watching.
I could have let that be enough. A woman had made a mistake about a man’s shirt, and the man had been kind about it, and everyone could have gone on to the chicken.
But behind her, up on the low platform where the band was set up, the drummer laid his sticks across the snare and stood.