The Man at the Hired Help Table
“Wes. Do me a favor.”
“Anything.”
He reached into the chest pocket of his pressed work shirt. For the first time in six years I saw him take out something without having to think about how to do it carefully. It was a photograph, folded once and then flattened again, soft at the creases. My mother, at the county fair in 1994, laughing with her whole head thrown back and a corn dog in one hand.
“I carried her to the lane,” he said. “I carried her while I dug. Seemed wrong to leave her in the truck.” He smoothed the edge. “Put her up there, will you? On the glass.”
I stood her photograph against the water glass, in the middle of the table, where the empty chair was. My jacket was hanging on the back of it.
“She’d have had a fit,” my father said, nodding at my shirtsleeves. “Groom without a coat.”
“She’d have had a fit about your boots.”
“She’d have been right. I polished them in the truck with my handkerchief.” He laughed. It was a thin laugh, very quiet, and then it caught in his throat. He pressed the back of his wrist to his eyes. “I wanted to wear that suit for her, Wesley. I wanted to stand up in front of her and have her see me in it.”
“She sees you, Dad.”
“I know.” He nodded at the photo. “I think she saw me in the hole, too. The whole morning. I think she thought I was a fool.”
“Dad.”
“A fool in a good cause.” He wiped his face.
I told him she would have forgiven him. I told him I thought she would have been the proudest woman in that barn. I do not know what else I said. Nina had her arm through my father’s, and her head on his shoulder, and she was crying openly, the way she does, without apology.
They served our table first, and we did not eat last.
Ms. Vance kept our table filled all through the toasts, between everything else she had to run. She refilled my father’s iced tea before he finished it. She brought a cushion for Nina’s grandmother’s chair. She set a slice of the cake in front of Dad that was cut from the middle, where the frosting is thickest, without being asked.
Jeff gave the best man’s toast, and I will admit I only half heard it, because I was watching my father’s hands around his water glass. But at the end Jeff lifted his glass toward the table and said, “To the man who built the arch, and the cable under it, and the day on top of it.” The barn laughed, and it let out something that had been held in all afternoon.
When the band called the first dance, Nina did something I had not planned. She took my hand and walked me across the floor to the table where my father sat, and said, “Earl, may I?”
“Honey,” he said, “I have clay on my shirt.”
“Good,” she said.
So the first dance of my marriage was my bride and my father, to an old song, in the open end of the barn, with the evening sun still pouring in through the doors like honey and the string lights not even needed yet. He danced the way men his age dance, in a careful square, one hand flat at her back and the other holding hers very lightly, as if she might bruise. I stood at the edge with my jacket off and my sleeves rolled and I was happier than I have ever been in my life.