The Wedding Song at the Legion Hall

What Tyler played next

When we came back in, Tyler was waiting by his table looking nervous all over again.

“Mrs. Engel,” he said. “Josh and Megan gave me something before the party. They said to play it after the toasts. Is it, is it still all right?”

I looked at Josh. Josh looked at the floor. Megan had come up beside us, and she took my hand.

“We made it in May,” she said. “We didn’t know Aunt Pam was going to do anything. We just thought, everybody’s going to toast you, but nobody’s going to show the Sundays.”

“Play it, Tyler,” Dave said.

Tyler pulled the screen down again. That picture of young Dave at the altar was gone.

Instead the first thing that came up was a photograph I had not seen in twenty years: our first apartment above the hardware store, a card table with a tablecloth over it, a pot roast in a blue enamel pan, and Dave, twenty-eight, with a carving knife, grinning at whoever was holding the camera.

Underneath it, Megan had typed: Sunday supper number one. June 2001.

The room went quiet in a different way than it had before.

It went on for about eight minutes. Josh had gone through every shoebox in our basement and every picture on my old phone. There was Josh in a high chair with mashed potatoes in his hair. There was the Sunday in the ice storm of 2013 when the power went out and we ate chili by lantern light, all four of us in our coats.

There was Dave saying grace with his head down and Megan, about six, peeking at the camera with one eye open. There was the Sunday Josh came home from basic training at Fort Leonard Wood with his head shaved, and I made his chicken and dumplings, and he ate three bowls.

There was Arlene at our table after her hip surgery, with her walker parked next to her chair and Dave cutting her meat for her. When that one came up, Arlene put her hand to her brooch and did not take it away.

Some of it was little video clips from my phone that I did not even know they had found. Dave pretending to drop the pie. Megan’s first boyfriend, sweating through his shirt, trying to make conversation with Dave about tractors. Me, laughing so hard at something I had my head down on the table.

And some of it was just the table. Our table, the same oak one for twenty years now, with the scratch in the corner from when Josh did his science project. Set for Sunday. Empty and waiting.

I had not known anybody was watching all those years. I thought I was just making supper.

The last picture was from three weeks earlier. All four of us at the table, with the timer on Megan’s phone, everybody looking a little off to the side because the phone was crooked. Underneath it, in plain white letters:

Thank you for every Sunday. 1,300 of them and counting. Love, Josh and Megan.

I did the math later. Fifty-two Sundays a year, twenty-five years. They were right, give or take a few Sundays at the hospital and the year we went to the Black Hills.

I could not see the screen anymore by then. Dave had his arm around me and he was crying too, quietly, the way he does at the end of war movies, with his jaw set like it was not happening.

All over the Legion hall, people were wiping their eyes with Auxiliary napkins. Aunt Marlys was blowing her nose. Earl had stopped pouring.

Then Tyler said, in his cracking voice, “That’s it,” and somebody started clapping, and then everybody was.