The Wedding Day We Spent on the Dock
The money
He had started putting his overtime into a separate account the winter she turned twenty-four. Winter overtime at the county is real money when the storms are bad.
By the time Megan and Tyler got engaged there was a little over $11,000.
By the time they set the date, he had worked more winters of nights and weekends and it was $14,000, all of it saved for her.
Tyler is a lineman for the electric co-op, a good, steady young man who calls Dan “sir” and once drove three hours in an ice storm to help us when our basement flooded.
Megan is a labor and delivery nurse, and Tyler’s folks paid for the rehearsal dinner and the bar.
The wedding was a June Saturday, the Lutheran church at two, the Legion hall after.
Dan had already bought his shirt and a gray suit at the store in Bemidji. I had bought a navy dress on sale and then felt guilty about it for a week.
Rob comes back
Two years before the wedding, Rob Kessler sent Megan a letter. An actual letter, in the mail, to her apartment.
She brought it to me at the school office on her lunch break and set it on my desk.
He was fifty-one. He had been sober about a month. He was working at a tire shop in Fargo and going to meetings in a church basement three nights a week.
He wrote that he was making amends, and that she was the first name on his list.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” Megan said.
“You don’t have to do anything with it,” I told her. “Not today. Not ever, if you don’t want to.”
She wrote back three weeks later. Then they had coffee at a truck stop halfway between, in Detroit Lakes.
Then they had coffee again. By that Christmas, he was calling her every Sunday.
I want to be fair to Rob here, because I have not always been. He did the work. He showed up for her.
He drove four hours when her car broke down in Moorhead. He sent her a card on her birthday, on the right day, every year.
Dan never said a bad word about him. Not once, not to Megan, not even to me in our bedroom with the door closed.
When I complained, he would say, “If he’s sober, that’s good for her. That’s what matters, Jill.”