The Soldier Bride Who Asked Mom for a Dish

The auxiliary ladies lined up the long folding tables down the middle of the room.

They set out the coffee urns and the slow cookers and stacked the paper plates and taped little paper flags to the ends of the tables, the kind the kids wave at the parade.

Walt came over to me while I was folding napkins and said, “I need to ask you something, and you can tell me no.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Your daddy’s not here to walk you up front,” he said. “And I know it’s not my place. But I stood next to him at every Memorial Day for twenty years. If you’d let me, I’d be honored.”

I could not answer him. I tried. I opened my mouth and nothing came out, so I just nodded, and he patted my shoulder twice the way Daddy used to, and walked off before either of us could embarrass ourselves.

The wedding was at four o’clock on a Saturday in the middle of June.

It was ninety-one degrees and so humid the air felt like a wet towel. The mockingbirds in the trees behind the hall were loud enough to hear inside.

I got dressed at Cody’s sister’s house. She helped me get my hair into a low bun, tight and neat at the back of my neck the way it has to be in uniform, with a hundred pins and half a can of hairspray.

At the hall, the long tables were covered end to end. Country ham biscuits on sheet pans. Two big roasters of burgoo and a row of slow cookers plugged in along the wall.

Barbecue pork shoulder from a man on the honor guard who smoked it all night in a trailer behind his house.

Green beans cooked down with bacon. Corn pudding. Deviled eggs on those special plates with the little dents. Four kinds of potato salad, because nobody in this county will agree on the right one.

At the end of the dessert table there were nine chess pies and a banana pudding the size of a washtub.

Donna had a whole system with masking tape on the bottom of every dish so the right one got back to the right house.

Two older veterans of the honor guard waited along the side of the room. They wore their post caps and white shirts, and both were past seventy. Each held an American flag on a long pole.

Walt was waiting for me at the back of the hall.

He was in his post cap and his good jacket, and he held out his arm and said, “Ready, soldier?” and I said, “Ready, Commander,” and we started walking.

Walt walked slow on purpose. His bad knee clicked every other step.

About halfway up he leaned over and said, very low, “He’d have been bawling by now, you know that,” and I had to bite the inside of my cheek.

Then he put my hand in Cody’s at the front, and he stepped back and stood at attention beside the honor guard, and I did not look back at the room again.

In uniform you face front. So I faced front.

I do not remember much of the vows. I remember Cody’s hands were sweating, and he kept letting go of mine to wipe his palm on his gray suit pants.

I remember the pastor’s voice and the hum of the string lights and the mockingbirds outside.