The Morning I Paid My Father Back

What I remember of the vows

Not much, if I am honest. I remember Tyler’s hands were rough and warm and he would not stop rubbing his thumb across my knuckles. I remember Pastor Dale got my middle name wrong and corrected himself. I remember Mason yelling “Miss Kayla is married!” before the pastor finished saying it.

I remember that when we turned around to walk out, my father was standing with everyone else, and he was crying, and he did not try to hide it.

The pole barn

The reception was at the big pole barn at the county fairgrounds, the one the 4-H uses for the hog show in July. It cost us eight hundred and fifty dollars for the day, plus the tables and chairs. Donna and her boys had spent three days in there.

They had swept every inch of the concrete and hung strings of white lights from the trusses. There were hay bales with quilts over them for the old folks who could not stand long. Mason jars on every table with zinnias from my mother’s garden.

The Lions Club did pulled pork and baked beans. The church ladies did sheet cakes. Tyler’s buddies from the elevator ran the cornhole tournament out on the grass, and somebody’s uncle had a speaker hooked up to a phone.

It was exactly what I had wanted. It was the wedding of two people from a little town who worked with their hands. I was not ashamed of one inch of it.

My father came. I had wondered if he would slip off after the church. He didn’t. He came in his work clothes, and he sat at the end of a long table with Grandpa, and he ate a plate of pulled pork without saying much of anything.

People came by to shake his hand. A few of them were men who had bought trucks off him. One of them was Tyler’s boss at the elevator, Jim Weaver, who had bought a Silverado from my father in 2017. They talked for a long time. I watched from across the barn and couldn’t hear a word.