The Wedding Supper in the Machine Shed

Gary

Dad heard. He looked out at the dark Chevy, still sitting at the end of the lane. He took off his suit coat and handed it to Doris. Then he walked out of the shed.

He walked down the whole lane alone, seventy-nine years old, in his white shirt and suspenders, in the cold.

I started after him, and Steve took my wrist and shook his head. So I stood in the doorway and watched my father walk a quarter mile in the dark to his son.

He knocked on the driver’s window. Then he opened the passenger door and got in, and the dome light came on, and I could see the two of them side by side before the door closed and the light went off.

They sat in that truck for forty minutes. Marlys made more coffee. Doris sat at the head table with Dad’s coat folded on her lap and her hand on the brooch, and she did not take her eyes off the lane.

I learned later what was said, a little from Dad and a little from Gary, years apart. Gary told him about the nights in the recliner, and about what Mom said near the end, when she was mostly sleeping.

She had squeezed his hand and said, “Don’t let your dad eat alone, Gary. He’ll forget to eat.”

Gary had promised her. Then he’d been too busy and too sad and too mad at God to go over there and do it.

Somebody else came along and did it for him, and it felt like being fired from the last job his mother ever gave him.

Dad listened to all of it. Then he told Gary about the prenup. “I wanted you to come without knowing,” he said.

“But I won’t let you sit out here all night on account of my pride. Doris made sure of the farm before I ever asked her. She did it for you kids.”

Then he said one more thing. “Your mother told me the same. Don’t eat alone, Walt. She told both of us. I’m only doing what she said.”

The truck door opened. Two men got out, one from each side, and walked up the lane together in the dark, slowly, the way Dad walks now.

Gary stopped in the doorway with his seed cap in his hands, the same way he’d stood at the kitchen door in August. Ninety-one people suddenly found something interesting about their coffee.

Doris stood up. She walked over to him with Dad’s coat over her arm and the brooch on her collar, and she didn’t say a word.

She just put her arms around him. And my big, stubborn brother, who had not cried at the funeral, held onto that little white-haired woman and cried into her shoulder in front of the whole county.

Marlys handed him a plate of ham buns without being asked, because that is what Lutheran women do with crying men. He ate three.

Thanksgiving

Sunday afternoon Gary came over without being asked and helped Steve haul the church tables back to town in his pickup. He didn’t say much. But he came.

Steve said we ought to take the string lights down before the wind wrecked them. I said leave them. He left them.

At Thanksgiving there were twenty-two of us, too many for Dad’s kitchen, so we set up four church tables in the machine shed again and Steve rolled in the big propane heater.

When I walked out with the turkey, Gary was on the orange stepladder, on the top step nobody is supposed to stand on, rehanging a string of lights that had come loose in the wind. Doris was holding the ladder.

“Hand me that end, would you, Doris?” he said. She did, and he plugged them in, and the old shed went gold again.