The Wedding Supper in the Machine Shed

The two trucks

Through the open doors you could see all the way down our lane to the gravel road, a quarter mile, in the last of the dusk.

The sky was going orange and then purple over the bean stubble.

At the end of the lane, two pickups sat side by side with their lights off. Gary’s dark Chevy.

Jim’s dark Ford with the Sioux Falls dealer plate frame. I could see the shapes of my brothers through the windshields, watching the shed fill with light and music.

I’ll tell you what I felt, because I promised myself I’d tell this honestly. I felt angry first.

They had missed the courthouse. They had missed Becky saying “I do, gladly.” Those were things they could never get back.

Then I felt sorry for them, sitting out there in the dark, with every pickup in the county having driven past them up our lane.

A few people noticed. Nobody said a word. That was their consequence, and I never had to lift a finger for it.

Dad kept dancing. Then one of the truck doors opened.

Jim

It was Jim. He stood in the road a minute with his hands in his jacket pockets. Then he started walking, and it took him a long time to walk that quarter mile, up out of the dark into the yard light and into the doorway of the shed.

The song was ending. Dad saw him. He stopped dancing, but he didn’t let go of Doris.

Jim walked across the concrete, and people moved their chairs to let him by. He didn’t go to Dad.

He went straight to Doris. He looked at the brooch on her collar for a long moment, and his face went red, and I watched him understand who had given it to her.

“Doris,” he said, and his voice was thick. “I’m sorry I wasn’t at the courthouse. I’m sorry for what we said. Would you dance with me?”

Doris looked at Dad. Dad stepped back and put her hand in Jim’s.

My little brother danced with our father’s new wife in the middle of my machine shed, stiff as a fence post, his chin trembling.

When the song ended the whole shed clapped, and Jim put his face down on Doris’s shoulder for just a second, like a boy.

Then he came and found me and hugged me so hard my glasses went crooked. “Gary won’t come in,” he said into my hair. “He told me to go ahead. He’s just sitting there.”