The Day Dad Gave Me Away
Jake Olson is not a talker. He’s thirty, he grew up on a farm west of Hatton, and he runs the dryer and the leg at the grain elevator, which means in the fall he works sixteen-hour days and comes home smelling like corn dust and diesel.
He thinks before he says anything, which is one of the reasons I married him.
He sat quiet a long time. Then he got up, opened the drawer by the phone, and came back with a yellow legal pad and a pencil.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s see what it actually costs.”
“You’re not mad at her?”
“I’m mad,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you how to feel about your stepmother. But your dad’s got a lot of bills, and she’s scared, and being mad at her doesn’t put a dime in our account.”
He licked the pencil, which he does, and which drives me crazy. “Church. Hall. Food. Dress. Go.”
We sat at that table until almost midnight. The church was the easy part.
Our pastor charged a small fee for nonmembers, but I’d been baptized and confirmed at that little white church out on the gravel road, so we only owed the organist and a donation.
The fire hall in town rented for $350 on a Saturday, tables and chairs included, and the volunteer firemen would run the bar if we paid for the kegs.
Jake’s mother knew a woman in Portland who did roast beef dinners for a hundred and fifty at fourteen dollars a plate.
By the bottom of the second page we had a number. About nine thousand dollars, if we kept it plain. Plain flowers.
A plain dress. A cousin with a good camera instead of a photographer. A playlist on somebody’s laptop instead of a band.
“We’ve got about four in savings,” Jake said. “We can make the rest by September if we both pick up shifts.”
“That’s the down payment money.”
“Then we wait another year on the house.” He put the pencil down. “Haley. I’d rather have your dad at our wedding than a house a year early.”
That’s when I cried again, but it was a different kind.
I work at the vet clinic in Mayville. I’m a licensed vet tech, which means I’m the one holding the dog while the doctor does the shot, and the one on my knees in a barn at two in the morning when a heifer is having trouble calving. That summer I took every on-call weekend nobody else wanted.
Jake picked up Saturdays at the elevator and spent his Sundays helping his uncle with the custom hay baling.
By July he had a farmer’s tan that ended in a hard line at his sleeves, and I had a bruise on my hip from a Belgian mare who didn’t like her teeth floated.
I bought my dress in Grand Forks at a bridal shop that was closing out its spring line.
It was plain white satin with a round neck and no beads at all. It cost two hundred and eighty dollars, and I tried on exactly three before I knew.
Jake’s aunts, all four of them, announced that they were making the bars, and nobody was allowed to argue with them about it.
There would be lemon bars and scotcheroos and the seven-layer kind with the coconut. That alone probably saved us three hundred dollars.