The Bouquet My Sister Handed Back

Four Years of Six Hundred Dollars

Ryan and I got engaged on a Tuesday night in his pickup, parked at the end of my parents’ lane, with the windows down and the frogs going in the ditch. He did not kneel. He just held the ring box out across the bench seat and said, “I think we should do this, Meg.”

I said yes before he finished. Then we sat there a long time, and we talked about money, because that is what two people from our part of South Dakota do after the happy part is over.

We did not want to borrow. Ryan had watched his folks pay off a loan for a combine for eleven years, and I had grown up hearing my dad talk about the farm crisis of the eighties like it was a war he had fought in.

Neither of us wanted to start married life owing anybody.

So we opened a separate account at the credit union in Brookings. We called it the wedding account, and we put $600 a month into it, and we did not touch it.

Not once. Not for a vacation, not for a newer truck, not when the furnace went out the second winter.

Ryan is a journeyman lineman for the rural electric co-op.

When the ice storms come through in March, he is gone for days, climbing poles at two in the morning in thirty below with the wind coming across the section lines like it has a grudge. Every hour of that storm overtime went into the account.

I am a dental assistant at a family practice on Main Street. I took every Saturday shift the office offered for four years.

I cleaned instruments, took X-rays, held the hands of six-year-olds getting their first fillings. Every one of those Saturdays went into the account too.

We drove Ryan’s 2011 Silverado the whole four years. It had 190,000 miles on it by the wedding, and the passenger door only opened from the outside.

I learned to roll the window down and reach out for the handle.

It came to a little over $28,000 by the end. I know that sounds like a lot for a barn wedding in South Dakota.

It did to us, too. But I had a spreadsheet, and every line on it had been argued over at our kitchen table.

The barn rental for a Saturday in June was $7,500.

The caterer out of Madison did pulled pork, brisket, cheesy potatoes and green beans for 180 people, and that came to just over $7,500 with the tables and plates. The photographer was $3,200, and she was worth every cent.

The bar was two kegs and a lot of boxed wine, about $3,000 with the bartender.

My dress was $1,400 off the rack at a shop in Sioux Falls, which I tried on four times before I let myself buy it. The DJ was $1,300.

The flowers were the only place we saved real money. My mother grows peonies along the whole south side of her farmhouse, a hedge of them her own mother planted.

Mom cut them the morning of the wedding, white and pale pink, and a lady from church tied them up for us.

So when I stood there on the dance floor and watched my little sister cry into her hands, I was not thinking about the money exactly.

I was thinking about four years. I was thinking about Ryan climbing poles in the dark.

I was thinking that we had given up a lot of small things to buy one big thing, and the big thing was this song. Three minutes and some seconds. The one dance everybody was supposed to watch.