The Wedding Song at the Legion Hall

I wrote her letters. I sent her a card when her first baby was born. Nothing.” Pam pressed her hand against her chest. “I lost my best friend because my little brother couldn’t keep his marriage together at twenty-two. And I introduced them. So whose fault is that?”

“Neither one of yours,” I said.

She shook her head. “Then five years later there’s you. And everybody loves you. Mom loves you. The whole church loves you. You’ve got the kids and the Sunday suppers and now a party at the Legion. And nobody ever says her name. It’s like she was never here. Like I never had her.”

I stood there in the gravel and let that settle.

“Last winter when we moved Mom into the apartment,” she said, “I cleaned out her basement. And there was my old tape. Rick filmed the whole wedding on that big camcorder he had. I was the maid of honor. I’m in it.”

She laughed again. “I took it to the drugstore in Willmar and had them put it on a disc, and I threw the tape out with Mom’s old VCR. I watched it about twenty times this spring. Me and Kristy, laughing in the church basement before the ceremony.”

“And tonight you wanted everybody else to watch it too,” I said.

“I wanted him to remember he broke something.” She looked up at me for the first time. “I had two glasses of wine and I told myself it would be funny. It wasn’t funny. I knew it wasn’t funny about ten seconds in. And then I couldn’t make my hand do anything. I just stood there.”

“I know,” I said. “I saw.”

“And then you said thank you.” She put her face in her hands. “You said thank you, Lori. I’d rather you slapped me.”

The only copy

We stayed out there a while. A truck went by on the highway. Somebody inside opened the side door and the music came out, the Chicken Dance, and then the door shut again.

Pam reached across to the passenger seat and picked something up. It was the DVD in a thin plastic case. She must have gone back in for it while Dave was talking, or Tyler had handed it to her. On the case, in her handwriting, in marker: Dave and Kristy, 6/18/94.

“It’s the only copy,” she said. “Kristy’s folks had the other tape, and it went in their basement in the ’97 flood in Breckenridge. Rick’s camcorder is long gone. This is it.”

She held it out to me.

“I don’t want it anymore,” she said. “I don’t want to be the person who keeps it. Do whatever you want with it.”

I took it. It weighed nothing.

“Pam,” I said. “You can come back in.”

“I can’t walk back in there.”

“You can. They’re all your neighbors. Your mother is sitting at the head table. Half those people have known you since you were showing calves.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “You did a hard thing to my husband tonight. But you are still his sister. And I am not going to be the reason you sat in a parking lot during his anniversary.”

She did not answer. I left her there with the door open and went back in.