The Wedding Bill and the Receipts
She scrolled for a minute. Her face did something complicated.
“Two payments,” she said. “Eleven hundred and fifty each. March and July.”
Right column. $2,300.
The dress. I will tell you that I had to sit with the dress for a moment. It was the line that hurt most, in a way, because I remembered the day. Kayla had gone to Fort Dodge with her friend Erin and found it in the second shop, and she had called me from the fitting room and said, “Mom, it’s perfect,” in a voice I can still hear. She had paid for it with money she saved from two summers working at the sale barn. $1,700 for the dress, $300 for the alterations.
The Eberharts’ typed list billed her for her own wedding dress.
“Right column,” I said. “$2,000.”
The flowers were the easy ones. I wrote a check to Rita Jorgensen at the flower shop for $1,200, on the same day I wrote one for the church. I knew because I had grumbled about the price of peonies in June.
Right column.
Then I added the left. I did it twice, because I did not believe it the first time, and Gilbert did it on the adding machine he’s kept since 1991.
The Eberharts had paid $9,900.
We had paid $12,500.
I put the pencil down.
“Twenty-two four hundred,” Gilbert said. “Nine nine hundred and twelve five. It closes.”
“What does that mean?” Kayla said.
“It means that if Marcia’s rule is that each side pays half,” I said slowly, “then each side owed $11,200. And Wayne and Marcia paid $9,900.”
“So they owe…”
“$1,300,” Gilbert said. “To you. By their own rule.”
Nobody said anything. Down the hall my grandson was telling his bear about the tractor store, and my daughter put both hands over her mouth.
“I don’t want their $1,300,” she said, through her fingers.
“Good.”
“I don’t want any of it. I want them to stop. I want Marcia to stop telling people that I’m a deadbeat. I want Owen to be able to go out to the farm.”
“Then we’ll show her,” I said. “That’s all. We’ll show her the page, with every one of their checks on it, and we’ll let her read it.”
“She’ll say we’re lying.”
“Then she can call Bev Hanson. And Orval Ivey. And Otis Pollard.”
Kayla wiped her nose on her sleeve. “You’re going to make me go to all of them.”
“I’m going to go with you,” I said.
We spent the next two days collecting receipts from people who knew us.
A town can be an awful thing when it gossips. But a town can also be a ledger, if you know who keeps the books.
Bev Hanson caters every funeral lunch and half the weddings in three townships out of the kitchen at Trinity Lutheran. She was elbow deep in a pan of funeral ham when we walked in. She dried her hands, listened to about two sentences, and said, “Oh, honey. Sit down.”
She went to the file box on the shelf above the coffee urn. She came back with her carbon of the contract for 180 plates, and I watched her read the line where it said who had paid what. “Deposit, $2,000, Wayne Eberhart. Balance $7,000, Gilbert Dahl, check thirty-seven seventy-one.” She turned it over and wrote across the bottom, in her careful school-teacher hand, “This is a true copy of my records,” and signed it and dated it.