The Wedding Song at the Legion Hall

The parking lot

I knew where she would be.

I told Dave I was going to the ladies’ room. He looked at me, and he knew I was not, and he let me go anyway. That is twenty-five years.

The side door of the Legion lets out onto the gravel lot by the grain elevator. It was a little after nine, and the sky in the west was still light the way it stays light in June up here, that long blue that goes on forever. The mosquitoes were out.

Pam was sitting in her Buick with the door open and her feet on the gravel. She was crying the way you cry when you have been holding it in for a long time, with her whole body.

I walked over and stood by the open door. I did not say anything at first. I have sat with a lot of people in a lot of church kitchens, and I have learned that the first thing you say is usually wrong.

“Go ahead,” she said finally, without looking up. “Tell me what you think of me.”

“I don’t know what I think of you yet,” I said. “I’d like to know why.”

She laughed, a terrible little laugh, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. Her mascara was all over.

“Kristy was my best friend,” she said. “Since 4-H. Since we were nine years old. We showed calves together at the county fair every summer for eight years. I’m the one who introduced her to Dave. At the fair. In the beer garden. I thought it was the best idea I ever had.”

I had known that, in the way you know things about your husband’s family. I had never heard it from her.

“When they split up, she didn’t just leave him. She left me. She moved to Fargo and she never called again. Not once.