The Wedding Song at the Legion Hall

The screen came down from the ceiling of the Legion hall with the same squeal it makes every Memorial Day, and ninety people turned their chairs around to look at it.

I thought it was going to be baby pictures. That morning Pam had told me she had “a little something” for the toasts, and I had said how sweet, because that is what you say to your husband’s sister.

Then the picture came up. It was grainy and too blue, the way old tapes are, with a little white date in the bottom corner: June 18, 1994.

A church I knew. The Catholic church in Appleton, with the red doors. A girl in a big puffed-sleeve dress coming down the aisle on her father’s arm, and at the end of the aisle, in a gray tux with a mullet he would deny to his grave, my husband.

He was twenty-one. He looked about fifteen.

“For old times’ sake,” Pam said into the microphone, and she was smiling. “Look how skinny he was. Don’t you all remember Kristy?”

A few people laughed, the way people laugh when they are not sure what kind of night it is yet. Then the laughing stopped, and all you could hear was the hum of the old projector fan and the pop of the tape audio through the Legion speakers.

I was sitting at the head table with my hand on Dave’s arm. I felt his arm go stiff under my fingers, like a fence post. He did not move. He did not look at me. He just stared at the screen at a boy he had not been in thirty-two years.

The party I paid for

I should tell you what that night was supposed to be.

My name is Lori Engel. I am fifty-one years old, and I have been the church secretary at Our Savior’s Lutheran in Benson, Minnesota, for nineteen years. I type the bulletins, I answer the phone, and I know which families need a casserole before the pastor does.

Dave and I were married on June 16, 2001. He is the parts manager at the implement dealership on the highway, and if you have ever needed a belt for a combine at nine o’clock on a Saturday night in October, there is a decent chance my husband drove in and opened the parts room for you.

For two years I put $125 out of every paycheck into an envelope tucked in the back of my recipe box. Dave never once looked in that box. Twenty-four envelopes, and I had $3,000.

I knew where every dollar of it went. The Legion hall was $400 for the night, because Dave’s dad had been a member and Dave belongs to the Sons of the Legion. The Auxiliary ladies did roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans and buns for $19 a plate, and for ninety people that came to $1,710.