The Garden Club Luncheon on Her Wedding Day

If I had to fight her for a spot, then the spot was not worth having. And if she won, which she might, I would have to sit in the front row knowing I was only there because I had made a fuss.

“So you’re just going to go to my house like she said,” Carla said.

“No,” I said. “I’m going to have the garden club luncheon. The way we always have. On the day it’s always been.”

Carla put her fork down. “Dawn.”

“I told her,” I said. “I told her on the porch. I told her it’s been on the calendar since January. She told me to move it. I didn’t say I would.”

Carla looked at me for a long time. Then she laughed so hard she had to sit down.

“Phil would have loved this,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “Phil would have built a bigger table.”

I want to be fair here. I want to be fair to Taylor the whole way through, because she is my child and I know her better than anybody alive.

She was not raised rich. She was raised on a lineman’s paycheck and a librarian’s paycheck, in a town where the big night out is the fish fry at the VFW and everybody knows what your truck is worth.

She was a smart kid, and a pretty one, and she went off to Missouri State on scholarships and part-time jobs. Somewhere along the way she got it in her head that where she came from was something to apologize for.

Whatever it was, she had been carrying a quiet shame about us for a long time. About the house, the town, the casseroles. About me, I suppose, in my cardigans with my reading glasses pushed up on my head.

So I did not think she was evil. I thought she was scared. And I thought that if I fought her with words, she would only dig in. Taylor has never once in her life backed down from a fight.

What I wanted was not to win. What I wanted was for her to see us. All of us, in the daylight, the way we really were. And I did not know how to make that happen.

So I called Phyllis.

Phyllis Dunn is 66 and has been the president of the Cedar Valley Garden Club for so long that nobody remembers voting for her. She is also my best friend, and has been since Taylor was in diapers.

She is a retired home economics teacher. She has a voice that could stop a food fight at fifty yards, and she can tell you the Latin name of anything blooming in southwest Missouri.

“Well, of course we’re still meeting at your place,” Phyllis said, before I had even finished. “It’s on the calendar. I printed the calendar. Forty ladies, same as always. I’ll bring the chicken salad.”

“Phyllis, there’s going to be a wedding that afternoon.”

“Then we’ll be done by one,” she said. “We are always done by one. Mary Ellen has her nap.”

“Taylor doesn’t want me there.”

There was a pause on the line, the long one Phyllis takes before she says something you will remember.

“Then she’s going to have to tell you that herself, in your own yard, in front of God and the garden club,” Phyllis said. “And I don’t think she will. I think she’s a scared girl. I’ve known her since she was the size of a sack of potting soil.”