A Wrench Passed Down at the Rehearsal Dinner
“But let’s be honest with each other, since we’re all family now.” Rick smiled. He really did smile. That was what I could not get past, that he said it with the warm face of a man giving a gift. “My boy-to-be has married up. And I think he knows it. I think he ought to be grateful that a girl like my daughter would take on a mechanic’s son. A school-bus driver’s boy, too. God bless Wendy, twenty-two years of those little ones, I couldn’t do it.”
Wendy’s hand came down on my wrist. It was not a hard grip. It was a small, flat, warm pressure, the same pressure she uses on a child who is about to cry on her bus. She did not look at me. She looked at her plate. She had worn her mother’s pearls.
“So here’s to Danny,” Rick said, and raised the glass. “Welcome up. We’ll teach you which fork.”
The laugh that followed was the worst part. It was not cruel. It was the easy, relieved laugh of people who had been told it was fine to laugh. They were bankers and seed dealers and a retired judge and a couple of Rick’s customers who farmed four thousand acres of wheat, and they had been handed a joke by the man paying for the evening, and they took it.
Megan had started to stand.
She was halfway out of her chair, her napkin sliding off her lap, her face white and then pink. “Dad,” she said, and her voice was small and furious. “Dad, that’s not.”
Danny caught her hand. He did not stand. He only held on, and shook his head once, an inch, and she sat back down, and I watched the two of them look at each other with their hands knotted together on the tablecloth. That is the picture I would keep from that night. Not Rick. Those two.
At the far end of the long family table sat an old man in a pressed white shirt, a cane hooked over the back of his chair. Rick’s father. He set down his fork and did not pick it up again.
I will come back to him.
Here is why I did not stand up.
At four o’clock that afternoon, in the parking lot of the church where the wedding would be held the next day, my son had put both hands on the roof of my truck and said, “Dad. Whatever he says tonight, let it go. Please.”
I had said, “What would he say?”
“You know how he is.” He looked at the steeple instead of me. “Megan says he gets going when he’s had wine. He’s been like that about me since we got engaged. A little joke here, a little joke there. The first Sunday dinner at their house he asked if I had a union card for my tools.” Danny shook his head. “I don’t care what he says about me. I really don’t. But it’s her night, Dad. It’s her whole family. If you say one word back, it turns into a fight, and that’s what everybody remembers about the wedding. I don’t want her to remember that.”