Seventy Regulars Came to My Wedding
On every one I wrote the same thing at the bottom: “Ceremony 2 p.m. at the Methodist church. Supper and dance at the community building to follow. I would love to have you there. Kaylee.”
I delivered most of them by hand, because in a town of nine hundred, mailing a card to a man three blocks away feels like you’re putting on airs. I drove out to the Hoffman place first.
Bud was in the shop with his son, fixing a belt on a swather. He wiped his hands on a red shop rag before he took the envelope, and he read it standing right there in the doorway with the sun behind him.
“I heard what happened,” he said. He didn’t say from who. In our town you don’t have to. “I been drinking somebody else’s coffee for three days, and I don’t care for it.”
“You don’t have to stop going in on my account,” I said. “I mean that, Bud. I didn’t come out here for that. I came because I want you at my wedding.”
He folded the card back into the envelope, very careful, and put it in the chest pocket of his shirt and snapped the pocket shut.
“Young lady,” he said, “I wouldn’t miss it if they had to bring me on a stretcher.”
I drove all over that county for two days. I found Dale Fisher in his garden and Wes Brandt at the post office and the Bauer twins arguing in front of the bank.
I left cards in screen doors and on kitchen tables. I left one with the retired preacher’s wife, who hugged me so hard my earrings got caught in her sweater.
I never once said a word about Vern. Not one. When people asked, I said I was leaving the cafe because I was getting married and moving, and that was true as far as it went.
But people talk. By Wednesday everybody knew what had happened, and I could not stop it, and I am not sure I would have if I could.
On the Thursday before the wedding, I did one more thing. I took the last cream card in the box and wrote it out to Mr.
and Mrs. Vern Atchison. I wrote the same line at the bottom that I wrote on all the others. I would love to have you there. Kaylee.
I mailed that one. I couldn’t make myself walk it up to their door.
Tyler found out when he saw the stamp on the kitchen counter. He picked up the envelope and read the name and looked at me for a long time.
“You’re inviting him.”
“I’m inviting them,” I said. “Arlene’s been like a second mom to me. And Vern’s going to have to look at himself someday. It might as well be at a wedding.”
Tyler set the envelope down and kissed the top of my head. “You’re a better person than me, Kay.”
“No I’m not,” I said. “I’m just more tired of being mad.”
Now here is where my mother nearly lost her mind. The RSVP cards started coming back the week before the wedding, and they kept coming.
We had planned for one hundred and twenty people at the community building. By Wednesday we had one hundred and eighty-nine yeses.
Seventy of them were from the cafe.