The Garden Club Luncheon on Her Wedding Day

She was a slender woman of about 57 with silver hair cut short and sharp. She wore a camel coat, good slacks and leather loafers. She looked exactly like what Taylor had told me she was: very put together.

She stopped at the edge of the grass and took in the whole yard at once. The maples. The gazebo. The two long tables. The three garden club ladies in their sweaters. Me.

Taylor started talking very fast. “Celeste, hi, I’m so sorry, this is just a mix-up, my mom has this little club thing, it’ll be gone by noon, I promise it will not look like this, I promise.”

Celeste did not seem to hear her. She was looking past all of us, at the far bed, along the fence.

She walked straight across the grass, past Taylor, past me, right up to Phyllis, who was standing by the mums. She pointed at the big pale yellow mum at the end of the row, the one with the button center.

“Is that a Mary Stoker?” Celeste said. “It is, isn’t it? I have been trying to get a Mary Stoker to come back past the second year for ten years. Who grew this?”

Phyllis turned and looked at me. Then she turned back to Celeste, and she smiled like Christmas had come early.

“It surely is, honey,” Phyllis said. “And Dawn grew it. Dawn grew everything you’re looking at. She’s had those beds for twenty-seven years. You want to see something, come look at her asters.”

And Celeste did. She put her purse down on the folding table, right next to my apple pie, and she followed Phyllis into my beds in her good leather loafers.

Taylor stood there at the gate with her mouth open.

I want you to understand this part. Celeste Harmon, of the Kansas City Harmons, who did a lot of charity work and had opinions about everything, was a certified Master Gardener with the University of Missouri Extension.

Within ten minutes, she and Phyllis were on their knees in my mum bed arguing about whether you should pinch back mums after the Fourth of July in a wet year. Within twenty, Barb had brought her a cup of coffee.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Phyllis told her.

“I’m doing it the Extension way,” Celeste said.

“The Extension way is for Kansas City,” Phyllis said. “This is the Ozarks. We’ve got clay you could make pottery out of.”

Celeste laughed so hard she had to sit back on her heels in the grass. It was not a polite little laugh. It was a real one, from the belly, the kind you cannot fake.

Taylor came and stood next to me by the pie table. She did not say anything for a long time. Her phone hung down at her side. She was watching her future mother-in-law kneel in my dirt.

“Mom,” she finally said, very quietly. “What is happening?”

“I believe,” I said, “that Grant’s mother is having a nice time.”

At ten-thirty, Celeste came back across the yard to me. She had dirt on both knees of her good slacks and did not seem to care at all. She held out her hand to me, and I wiped mine on my apron and shook it.

“Dawn,” she said. “I’m Celeste. I’m sorry, I should have started with that. I have been dying to meet you for a year. Grant told me you were a librarian and a gardener, and I thought, well, I’m going to like her.”

“I’m glad you came early,” I said.