A Wrench Passed Down at the Rehearsal Dinner
So I promised him. I said I would keep my seat and my mouth shut, and I meant it.
Now I know what some of you are thinking. A father stands up. He says, Rick, you take that back, or he takes his boy out to the truck and lets the Whitcombs eat their prime rib alone.
I ran every version of it in about four seconds, and each one ended the same way: Megan in the middle, crying in her wedding dress tomorrow over a thing that happened at her own rehearsal dinner. My son was twenty-nine and had never once asked me to keep quiet about anything. He was asking now.
And there was something older than my promise. When a man comes into the shop yelling, the first thing you learn is that the noise is not the problem. Somewhere underneath is a knock, and if you jump on the noise you never hear it. I had been watching Rick Whitcomb for four months. I had a pretty good idea what was knocking. Rick knew exactly who I was, too. To him I was still the Dolan kid who swept his daddy’s floor.
I just did not know yet what I was going to do about it.
So I sat there and held my wife’s hand under the table, and Rick sat down to polite applause.
Pastor Burl Larsen from Megan’s church stood up, a round, kind man with a voice that had spent thirty years making funerals bearable. He clapped his hands together once.
“Well!” he said. “That’s one way to begin. We have a few more toasts before we eat, folks. Tom, I believe you’re up next, as father of the groom.”
The room went quiet in a different way.
I knew what they were thinking. Here comes the poor mechanic, and he is going to have to say something gracious about a speech that just insulted his boy. A woman in a green dress pressed her lips together in sympathy.
Danny looked at me. His eyes said, Dad, please.
I put my napkin on my chair, and I stood up, and I put my right hand in my jacket pocket.
I have to tell you about Harold Whitcomb now, because he is the whole story.
I grew up in Sterling, Kansas, a town of about two thousand west of Hutchinson, on a little acreage with a hay barn and a gravel drive. My father, Joe Dolan, put up hay for half the county. He died on a Tuesday in March of 1984, in the middle of a field, with the baler still running. A heart attack. He was forty-nine. I was sixteen, and I found him.