Seventy Regulars Came to My Wedding

So I kept them in a coffee can on my dresser. A Folgers can, the big red one. I never counted them. By the night Vern fired me, it was so heavy I could not lift it with one hand.

There were others. Dale Fisher, who had been a lineman for the electric co-op and could tell you the weight of every wire on every pole between here and Concordia.

The Bauer twins, Ron and Don, who were seventy-six and still argued about who was born first. Wes Brandt, who drove a school bus for thirty-eight years and knew the birthday of every kid in the county.

And then there was the Friday fish crowd, which was mostly couples. Fried catfish and coleslaw and hush puppies, all you can eat, nine ninety-five.

Some of those couples had been coming every Friday since before I was born. They knew my grades. They knew when I broke up with my first boyfriend.

One of the ladies knitted me a scarf when I left for community college in Beloit, and another one sent a card every semester with five dollars in it.

I lay there and counted them up in my head. The liars’ table. The fish crowd. The two ladies who came in for pie every Wednesday.

The retired preacher and his wife. Mr. and Mrs. Pruitt, who drove in from their farm twelve miles out every Sunday after church.

And I realized something that made me sit up in the dark. I was never going to pour coffee for any of them again.

Tyler and I had already put money down on a little house in the next town over, closer to the elevator where he was going to be foreman.

I had thought I would keep working at the Corner Cafe and drive the twenty minutes, at least until we had kids. Now that was gone.

In two weeks I was going to get married and move away, and the last time I saw those people would have been a Saturday morning at ten thirty, with nobody saying goodbye.

That was the part I could not stand. Not the money. The goodbye.

In the morning I went to my mom’s sewing room and got out the box of leftover wedding invitations.

We had ordered two hundred because the printer in Beloit gave a better price on two hundred than one-fifty. There were forty-one left.

My mom found me at the kitchen table with a pen and an old phone book. “What are you doing, sweetheart?”

“I’m inviting the cafe,” I said.

She sat down across from me and didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said, “All of them?”

“All of them I can find.”

“Kaylee.” She put her hand on mine. “If this is about getting back at Vern, I need you to think hard about it. That’s not who we raised.”

I looked at her, and I told her the truth. “It’s not about Vern. Mom, I’ve known those people since I was sixteen. Bud Hoffman has given me a quarter every morning for nine years. I’m not going to just disappear on them. I want them to see me get married.”

She nodded slowly. Then she got up and got another pen out of the junk drawer and sat back down. “Read me the names,” she said. “I’ll do the envelopes, you do the cards. Your handwriting’s prettier.”

We ran out of printed invitations by noon. Jess came over and we hand-wrote the rest on plain cream cards from the dime store in Beloit.