The Garden Club Luncheon on Her Wedding Day

“I almost didn’t,” she said, and she glanced at Taylor. “I got the feeling I wasn’t supposed to.”

Taylor turned red right up to her hairline.

Celeste looked at her for a second, kindly, and then looked back at me. “Is this the gazebo Grant told me about? The one your husband built?”

“Phil built it,” I said. “For Taylor’s tenth birthday. She wanted to be a princess.”

Celeste walked over to it and put her hand flat on one of the posts. She ran her thumb along a joint. She looked up at the little cupola on the roof, and the weathervane shaped like a bird, which Phil had cut out of an old tin sign.

“He knew what he was doing,” she said softly. “My father was a carpenter. You could hang a truck off this.”

That was when Taylor started to cry. Not loud. She just stood there by the pie table with her face crumpling and the tears running down, and she put her hand over her mouth.

I went to her. Of course I did. I put my arms around her, flour and apron and all, and she let me, the way she had not let me in a long time.

“Come on,” I said. “Come sit with me a minute.”

We went and sat on the gazebo steps. The same steps Phil built, that I had swept that morning. Celeste had the good sense to go back to the beds with Phyllis, and the other ladies busied themselves with napkins.

Taylor sat with her knees pulled up, like she used to sit when she was ten, and she cried until she was done. I didn’t say anything. I just kept one hand on her back.

“I’m so sorry, Mom,” she said at last. “I’m so sorry. I don’t even know how to say how sorry.”

“Then tell me why,” I said. “That’s all I want. Just tell me why.”

She wiped her face on the sleeve of her cream sweater. “Last Christmas we went up to Celeste’s for dinner,” she said. “In Kansas City. It was this big beautiful house, and there were all these people, and everybody had a story about where they went to school.”

“And somebody started talking about a wedding they’d been to,” she said. “A farm wedding. Out in the country somewhere. And Celeste laughed and said something like, well, at least nobody had to sit on a hay bale this time.”

“That’s all she said?”

“That’s all she said,” Taylor said, and she laughed a little through her nose. “One sentence. About hay bales. And I just sat there and I felt like everybody at that table could see right through me. Right to here.”

She waved one hand at the yard. The tables, the mums, the old ranch house with the carport.

“I thought she’d look at this and think we were a joke,” she said. “And I thought she’d look at you and think, oh, that’s where she comes from. And I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand being that girl again.”

“What girl?”

“The girl in the cafeteria with the generic cereal,” she said. “The girl who never had the right shoes. I worked so hard, Mom. I worked so hard to not be her anymore.”

I sat with that a while. The maples were rustling. Down by the beds, Celeste and Phyllis were laughing about something, and Barb was trying to get a word in.

“Honey,” I said. “That girl is the best person I have ever known. Your daddy thought so too. He built her a castle.”