Seventy Regulars Came to My Wedding

I took it. I didn’t open it. I didn’t need to.

Then he held out the pie. It was sour cream raisin, Arlene’s, the one she made every Thanksgiving for the cafe and never any other time of year, because she said it was too much trouble to waste on an ordinary Tuesday.

“She made it sitting down,” he said. “On a stool. With her walker parked next to her. She said if I came back home with it, I’d be sleeping at the cafe.”

Somebody at the fish crowd tables laughed, and then caught themselves.

Vern took a breath. I watched him do it, the way you’d watch a man get ready to lift something heavy.

“I was wrong,” he said. He said it loud enough for the tables near us to hear, and I think he meant to.

“I was scared to death to be in that kitchen alone on a Saturday, and I took it out on the one person who never once let me down.”

He looked down at his apron, like he had just noticed it.

“And it wasn’t only the Saturday,” he said. “You’re the third girl I’ve had in that place since I was forty who got married and moved off. Every one of them, I taught everything I knew, and every one of them left. I guess I got it in my head you were leaving me, too. And I wanted to be the one who did the leaving, for once.”

He shook his head. “That’s no excuse. That’s just the reason. I kept your money because I meant to settle up, and then I was too proud to drive out and do it. I’m sorry, Kaylee. I’m sorry I wasn’t standing in that church today. Arlene says I’ve got no business calling myself your friend if I couldn’t do that much.”

I didn’t say anything for a second. The whole room was waiting on me. I could feel it on the back of my neck.

What I wanted, standing there with Bud’s hand in one of mine and an envelope in the other, wasn’t to win. I had already gotten what I came for.

I had gotten my goodbye. I had gotten seventy people who drove in from every corner of the county to watch me get married.

“I invited you, Vern,” I said. “I meant it. I’m glad you came.”

His face did something then, a sort of crumple that he got under control. He nodded hard, twice, and looked at the floor.

That’s when Bud let go of my hand.

He turned around and walked back to the liars’ table, slow and straight, and pulled out the empty chair at the end. It was the chair Vern used to sit in at the cafe on slow afternoons, when he’d come out of the kitchen in his apron and drink a cup of coffee with the old men and argue about the price of wheat.

“Sit down, Vern,” Bud said. “You look like hell. And somebody get this man a plate before the brisket’s gone.”

Dale Fisher was already up getting a plate. The Bauer twins slid over to make room, arguing about which one of them should move.

Wes Brandt poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the table and pushed it toward the empty chair.