The Tractor at the Church Door

The drive home

We drove home from the rehearsal dinner in the pickup, Joan and me, with the leftover bars on her lap in a nine-by-thirteen pan.

It was dark and cold, the first real frost coming, and the heater smelled like dust.

Neither of us said anything for the first two miles. Then Joan said, “Well.”

“Well,” I said.

“You didn’t say anything,” she said. “I was proud of you.”

“What was I going to say?” I asked her. “That my feelings were hurt? The night before our daughter’s wedding? In front of the pastor and forty people and Ben’s grandmother?”

Joan didn’t answer that, because there was no answer. That was the whole reason I’d kept quiet.

A father of the bride doesn’t start a fight in a church basement the night before. Whatever it costs him, he swallows it. That’s the job.

But there was another reason, and it was the one that kept me awake. Katie hadn’t said anything either.

She had sat there and looked at her plate, and she hadn’t said, “No, I’m taking the tractor.” Not one word.

“Maybe she changed her mind,” I said. “She’s twenty-seven. Grown girls change their minds. Maybe she likes the car better and didn’t know how to tell me.”

“Maybe,” Joan said.

“She’s marrying into that family. Maybe she doesn’t want to start out on the wrong foot with his mother. I wouldn’t blame her for that.”

“No,” Joan said. “You wouldn’t.”

We pulled into the yard. The yard light was on over the milk house.

I sat there with the engine running for a minute, looking at the machine shed where the 60 was parked under a tarp.

Joan looked at me. “You’re going to bring it anyway, aren’t you.”

“I’m going to wash it,” I said. “That’s all. I’m going to wash it, because it’s dirty, and I said I would. If it ends up at the church, it ends up at the church. Nobody has to ride it.”

She patted my arm the way you pat a dog that’s about to do something foolish and can’t be stopped. Then she took her pan of bars and went in the house.