The Day Dad Gave Me Away

The rest of the ceremony went by in a blur. We said our vows. Jake’s voice cracked on “in sickness and in health,” and the whole church laughed and cried at the same time.

Dad sat beside us in his chair at the front the whole way through, where Jake had insisted he stay.

When the pastor said “you may kiss the bride,” Dad clapped his good hand against the armrest, over and over, and everybody laughed.

We walked back up the aisle as husband and wife. Jake pushed Dad’s chair behind us.

At the door, the men from the elevator were waiting with birdseed instead of rice, because rice is bad for the birds, and Jake’s uncle said that was the only rule they’d agreed on.

The reception was at the fire hall in town. It’s a big metal building with the two engines pulled out onto the apron for the night and the floor swept clean.

Jake’s aunts had covered the long folding tables in white paper and set a jar of sunflowers on each one.

The roast beef came out in big steel pans, with mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans and dinner rolls.

The bars came out on every plate anyone owned. There were scotcheroos stacked so high on one tray they kept sliding off.

Dad sat at the head table with us, at the end, where the wheelchair could slide right up. Connie sat next to him.

She’d stopped crying but her eyes were swollen, and she cut his meat for him in small, neat pieces without saying a word.

I tried to catch her eye a few times during dinner. She kept looking down at her plate.

Once I saw her lean close to Dad and say something, and he looked at her a long moment and nodded.

After dinner, while the firemen were rolling the kegs out and Jake’s cousin was fighting with his laptop and the speakers, I saw Connie pull her checkbook out of her purse.

She opened it right there on the white paper tablecloth, beside her coffee cup. She wrote something out carefully in her bookkeeper’s hand.

Then she turned the checkbook around and slid it and the pen to Dad, and held it flat for him while he signed his name with his left hand, slow and crooked, the way the therapist taught him.

She tore it out. She put it in one of the little white envelopes from the card box. Then she got up and came around the table to where I was standing with Jake by the cake.

“Haley,” she said. “Can I talk to you a second? Just you and Jake. Over here.”

We followed her to the corner by the equipment lockers, where it was a little quieter.

The fire hall smelled like coffee and roast beef and old rubber boots. Connie stood with her back to the wall and held out the envelope in both hands.

“This is yours,” she said. “It’s from our checking account. His and mine. He signed it himself, just now. You saw.” Her voice wobbled. “It’s five thousand dollars.”

I didn’t take it. I couldn’t make my hand move.

“I told you he didn’t remember,” Connie said. “He remembered. He’s been trying to tell me since July. He’d point at the checkbook and point at your picture on the fridge and get so upset, and I’d tell him, Gene, you’re confused, honey, you’re mixed up. I told him that. To his face.”