The Wedding Song at the Legion Hall

The burn barrel

Dave was standing by the bar with Earl. Earl is seventy-seven and was a Marine in Vietnam and has tended bar at the Legion every Saturday since 1990. He took one look at my face and found something to do at the other end of the bar.

I held out the DVD. Dave looked at it and then at me.

“She gave it to me,” I said. “She said it’s the only one. I think it’s yours to decide.”

He turned the case over in his hands. He looked at the handwriting on it for a long time.

“Is she all right?” he asked.

That is my husband. Thirty minutes after his sister did that to him in front of the whole town, the first thing he asked was whether she was all right.

“She’s in her car,” I said. “She’s not all right. But she will be.”

He nodded. Then he walked out the back door of the Legion, past the kitchen where the Auxiliary ladies were scraping plates, out to the back lot where Earl keeps the burn barrel. They burn the cardboard from the beer deliveries in it, and Earl had lit it at seven o’clock to get rid of the boxes from the setup.

Josh followed his father out. I followed Josh.

The barrel was going good, orange coming up through the holes rusted in the side. Dave opened the case and took the disc out and looked at it, that rainbow shine it has in the firelight.

“You want to watch it first, Dad?” Josh asked. “One more time?”

“No,” Dave said. “I was there.”

He snapped the disc in half across his knee. It took him two tries. Then he dropped the two pieces in the barrel, and the case after them, and the plastic curled and went black and gave off a stink that made all three of us step back.

He did not say anything. He put one arm around Josh and one around me, and we stood there and watched it burn for a minute, the three of us in our good clothes behind the Legion, with the mosquitoes biting and the Chicken Dance still going on inside.

“Megan’s going to kill me,” Josh said. “She ironed this shirt for me.”

Dave laughed. It was the first time he had laughed all night.