The Wedding Song at the Legion Hall

The sheet cake from the bakery in Willmar was $140. White cake, buttercream, “Dave and Lori, 25 Years” in blue. I paid Tyler Haugen, a senior at the high school who does wedding dances to save for college, $250 to bring his speakers and play music until midnight.

I spent about $300 on string lights, paper lanterns, white tablecloths and carnations in mason jars. The last $200 I put behind the bar with Earl, so the first round would be on us.

That is a lot of money for a church secretary. I did not care. I wanted one night where the whole town came and ate roast beef and told my husband he had done all right.

Our kids helped me set up. Josh is twenty-four and works for the county highway department and drills one weekend a month with the National Guard. Megan is twenty-two and just finished her nursing degree in Mankato. They hung the lanterns while I fussed with the tablecloths, and they kept whispering to each other and going quiet when I walked by.

Dave’s mother, Arlene, came in her wheelchair from the senior apartments, with her good brooch on. She is eighty and she does not miss a thing.

And Pam came, of course. Pam is fifty-five, two years older than Dave. She came in a red blouse and walked straight to Tyler’s table by the dance floor and talked to him for a long time with her hand on his shoulder.

I saw it. I thought she was asking for a song.

Why I did not run to the projector

People ask me why I did not just get up and pull the plug. I have thought about it a lot.

By the time I understood what I was looking at, it was already playing, ten feet wide, in front of ninety people. Pam had brought her own little DVD player from home and Tyler had hooked it to the Legion’s projector with the same cord they use for the veterans’ slideshow. He had no idea what was on it. Nobody did except Pam.

Tyler was seventeen. He was standing behind his laptop looking straight at me, white as the tablecloth, waiting for an adult to tell him what to do.

If I had run across that hall in my blue dress and yanked the cord, that is what everyone would have remembered. Not the roast beef. Not the twenty-five years. The secretary from Our Savior’s diving at a DVD player.

And Dave was frozen. I want to be fair to him. My husband can pull a transmission and he can calm a scared heifer, but he is not a man who makes a scene, and he had never in his life been ambushed by his own sister in front of the whole town. He sat there like he had been hit.

On the screen, the priest was asking young Dave if he would take this woman.

I looked across the head table at my children. Josh had his jaw set the way his father does when a part comes in wrong. Megan had a napkin pressed to her mouth. Her eyes were full.

Arlene, down at the end, had both hands flat on the tablecloth.

Something in me went very quiet and very clear. I thought: I am not going to let my kids watch their father sit and take this.