The Dance Her Father Saved

Regina

I found Regina Whitlock in the lobby with the wedding coordinator, a pleasant young woman named Courtney, who was holding a clipboard like a shield.

Regina is Dylan’s mother. She is sixty, with a silver bob that never moves, a navy dress, and a string of pearls she touches with two fingers when she is deciding something. She chairs the hospital auxiliary’s spring gala. She has never, in my hearing, said a word that was not already finished and ironed.

She had also paid for most of the wedding, forty-one thousand dollars of the fifty-two, because she wanted it at the club and I could not have afforded the club if I had sold the combine. That was not why I kept my voice down. But everybody in that building noticed it.

“Lorene.” She took my hands. She has cool, dry hands. “You look lovely. Did you find your seat?”

“I did. I found the card, too.”

Her face did not change. Regina’s face does not change until she has decided what it will change to.

“Courtney, would you give us a moment?” She waited until the clipboard had gone. “I hoped I would have a chance to explain before you saw it.”

“I would be glad to hear it.”

“It’s a kindness, truly. A dance like that, with Sam, with everyone knowing. I have seen them go wrong. Everyone ends up in tears, and half the room does not know where to look. It would make everyone uncomfortable. I thought I was sparing Katie. And you.”

“Did Katie agree to it?”

“Katie was very gracious. We talked in August about a moment of remembrance during the toasts instead. She said she wanted whatever would keep the day smooth.”

That was true, I found out later. Katie had said exactly that, because she had no fight left in her and the woman across the table was going to be her mother-in-law for forty years.

I want to be honest about why I did not do the obvious things. I could have gone out on the eighteenth green and told my daughter, in her dress, in front of the photographer. I could have stood in that lobby and used the voice I used on the school board in 1994.

And I knew how every one of those ended. Katie in her wedding pictures with her face wrecked. Regina telling her husband over the shrimp that poor Lorene was not herself today, and the whole Wichita side of the room nodding, because grief has a way of letting other people decide you are unreasonable. The one thing Regina had said she wanted to avoid was a scene, and I would have handed her one, wrapped, with a bow.

Sam used to say, when a man at the elevator got loud, “The quiet one at the table is the one who’s done the arithmetic.” I had done the arithmetic. I had also remembered that I was not alone in that building.

“I understand,” I said.

“Thank you for being gracious.”

“I haven’t said I was.” I smiled at her. I meant it kindly, which I think confused her more than anything else I could have said. “You have a great many people to see. I’ll let you go.”

She touched her pearls, and she went.