A Wrench Passed Down at the Rehearsal Dinner
He found me at the reception a little after four, by the coffee urn. He had a cup in his hand he wasn’t drinking. He stood next to me for a while looking at the cake table, the way two men stand at a fence.
“I had a few glasses of wine last night,” Rick said.
“It wasn’t the wine.”
He didn’t argue that. A muscle moved in his jaw.
“I said something about your wife I shouldn’t have. That part I’ll say plain. I’m sorry for that one.”
“That one you owe her, not me.”
“I know it.” He turned the cup a quarter turn on its saucer. “The rest of it I’m not going to talk about. Not today. Maybe not ever. You had no business putting my father in the middle of it, Tom, and you know it.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “I’d do it again.”
He looked at me then. I could not tell you what was in it. It was not hatred and it was not thanks. Then he put the cup down and went to find his daughter, and that was the last we said to each other about it that day.
He shook Danny’s hand once, I am told, and said congratulations. Danny said thank you. Neither said another word.
Wendy got her four sentences in August. Rick drove out to the school bus barn on a Tuesday morning, found her at the fuel pump, and said them looking at the pump the whole time. She told me about it that night. She said she had not forgiven him and had not made him feel any smaller either. “He’s not a bad man, Tom,” she said. “He’s a man who’s been scared a long time.”
Rick still has his edges. In July he made a joke at a cookout about “the garage crowd,” and Megan just looked at him, and he said, “I heard it,” and went to the cooler. He is working on it. Slowly, and not always where I can see.
The Monday after Danny and Megan got back from the Smokies, I was under a Silverado at the shop in Sterling when I heard a car door in the gravel.
It was Rick’s car. He had driven his father out from Hutchinson. Harold had asked him to, Danny told me later. Rick didn’t get out. He parked by the fence, left the engine running, and sat behind the wheel with both hands on top of it.
Harold came across the lot with his cane, in a pressed white shirt, one careful step at a time, and refused the arm Danny offered him. He stopped in the open bay door and looked a long time at the lifts, the red tool chests, the pegboard, the coffee can of cotter pins. I think he was counting what had changed from the Quonset hut. Not much, I’d guess.