The Garden Club Luncheon on Her Wedding Day

Then Phyllis prayed over the chicken salad, the way she has for 18 years, and we ate.

During the pie, Celeste leaned over to me. “Dawn, can I ask you something? Who’s doing Taylor’s flowers?”

I looked at Taylor. Taylor looked at her plate.

“A florist in Springfield,” Taylor said. “White roses and eucalyptus. They’re bringing them at two.”

Celeste nodded slowly and looked out at my beds. Then she looked at Phyllis. Then back at Taylor.

“I don’t want to step on anything,” she said carefully. “It’s your wedding, sweetheart. But you are sitting in the middle of the most beautiful fall garden I’ve seen in years, and there are forty women here who know how to arrange a flower.”

Nobody said anything for a second.

Then Taylor put her fork down and looked at me. “Mom,” she said. “Could we? Is that too much? Would you even want to cut your mums for this?”

I thought about Phil, standing in this yard with a level in his hand. I thought about the summer I planted those beds, with a baby on my hip and no idea what I was doing.

“Honey,” I said. “That’s what they’re for.”

You have never seen forty women move so fast in your life.

They cut mums in orange and yellow and that deep rust. They cut the last of my zinnias and a whole armload of purple asters. Somebody went home and came back with branches of bittersweet off her fence line.

The florist from Springfield arrived at two with her white roses, took one look, and laughed. We put her roses on the reception tables under the tent, and she stayed an hour to help.

Celeste took the bouquet herself. She sat on an upside-down bucket by the gazebo with her sleeves rolled up and built Taylor a bridal bouquet out of my yellow mums and the white ones from the side bed.

She tied it with a strip of ivory ribbon off one of the pie boxes, and she worked the stems so tight and clean that Phyllis whistled.

“Okay,” Phyllis admitted. “Maybe you pinch them right.”

The tent crew showed up at noon, four young men from Joplin in a flatbed, right on time. They stood at the edge of the yard and looked at forty ladies with pruners, and the foreman took his cap off.

“Ma’am,” he said to me, “we can wait. Tell us where you want it.”

“Up by the house, so the gazebo stays in the open,” I said. “That was always the plan. Just give us forty minutes to clear the tables.”

They waited. Then they put up the tent, and three of the garden club husbands who had come to pick up their wives stayed to help them stake it. Barb’s husband Dale ran the level on it like a surveyor.

Grant came at two with his groomsmen, and his father, Richard, who was a quiet, tall man in a navy suit. Grant took one look at his bride in her sweater, red-eyed and laughing with an armful of zinnias, and walked straight over and kissed her.

Then he came over to me and shook my hand, and then gave up on shaking it and hugged me instead.

“Mrs. Mercer,” he said into my ear. “I am so sorry about the hotel thing. I didn’t know until last week, and I told her it was crazy. I’m really glad you’re here.”

“Me too, Grant,” I said. “And it’s Dawn.”