The Bouquet My Sister Handed Back

“I gave them back,” she said. “And I asked the accordion man to start over. And Arlene danced with her husband, and I went out to the parking lot and yelled at this one for twenty minutes.” She tipped her head at Walt again. “And then I said yes.”

Walt cleared his throat. “Married her in October,” he said. “Haven’t stopped apologizing since.”

“Almost seventy years,” Dorothy said. “He still brings it up.”

“I bring it up,” Walt said, “because it was the best idea I ever had and the worst way I ever had it.”

Dorothy laughed again, that girl’s laugh, and leaned her head against his shoulder.

He put his big old hand over hers on the table, and they sat like that, and I sat beside them and cried. Not about the dance. About them.

“Arlene and I were close our whole lives,” Dorothy said after a while. “Closer after that, if anything. Something like that, you either let it ruin you or you let it make you laugh. I’d go with laugh, honey.”

When her daughter came in to take her to the car, Dorothy squeezed my hand one more time. “That was a pretty dance,” she said. “The second one. I saw every bit of it.”

The Next Morning

I did not sleep much on our wedding night, but not for the reasons people joke about. I lay awake in the motel in Brookings and watched the ceiling fan and thought about my sister.

Kelsey and I are three years apart. When we were little, we shared a room with a crooked line of masking tape down the middle of the carpet. She was always crossing it.

She crossed it to borrow my sweaters and my hair ties and my side of the closet, and she crossed it at night when there was thunder and she did not want to say she was scared.

I used to get so mad about that line. And then I would wake up with her cold feet on my legs and her hair in my face, and I would not move, because she was finally asleep.

Ryan rolled over around three and found me awake. “You okay?” he said.

“I think so,” I said. “Ryan, she gave it back. She didn’t have to. Everybody was on her side. And she gave it back.”

“Yeah,” he said. “She did.” And then, because he is Ryan, he added, “Your sister’s all right, Meg. She’s always been all right. She just crosses lines sometimes.”

I laughed so hard I had to put the pillow over my face.

Kelsey called me at nine the next morning. She had not slept either. I could tell by her voice.

“I’m taking it off,” she said. “The ring. I’m putting it in the box and we’re going to do it later, a different way, when it’s ours. I don’t want people looking at your pictures and seeing my ring in the background.”

“Kels.”

“I mean it. Tanner said the same thing. He feels sick about it. He drove out to the gas station at six this morning just to walk around.”

“Keep the ring on,” I said.

She was quiet a long time. Then she said, very small, “Are you mad at me?”

“I was,” I said. “For about four minutes. Then you handed me back my flowers.”

I heard her start crying on the other end. I heard Tanner in the background say something, and her say, “She’s okay. She’s okay.”

“Here’s what I want,” I said. “I want you to announce it the right way. Just us. A family supper, out at Mom and Dad’s. And I’m making the cake.”