Forty Chairs Under the Cottonwood

He had asked me first, before he asked her. He drove out on a Saturday in November and stood in the barn with his hands in his pockets and asked if I would mind. I told him I would mind if he didn’t.

So that January, Emily put both hands flat on the oilcloth the way my mother used to when she meant business, and she told me what she wanted.

“Forty people, Dad. Out here, under the cottonwood. A DJ for after. House wine, and beer in a cooler. Josh’s aunt will do the food. That’s it. That’s all I want.”

“That’s all?” I said.

“That’s all,” she said. “I’ve been to the big ones. I stand in a corner and watch the bride cry because she’s so tired. I want to talk to every single person who comes. I want to know all their names.”

I asked her what it would cost. She had it written down already, on the back of a pharmacy receipt, because she is her mother’s daughter in that way.

The DJ, the wine, a rain tent, forty rental chairs, the license.

It came to a little over $4,200. I told her I would pay every cent. She shook her head and said she and Josh would split it with me.

We argued for ten minutes, and for once in my life I won an argument with that girl.

Josh did not say much. When they left, he shook my hand at the door and said, “She’s been planning this one since she was a kid, you know. Under that tree.” I did know. I had watched her do it with her dolls.

Lisa and I were married at the Minnehaha County Courthouse when she was nineteen and I was twenty-one.

She wore a blue skirt and a borrowed blouse. I wore my only sport coat, which was too short in the arms.

I was in my first year as an apprentice lineman, and we had $340 between us.

Her mother, Bonnie, did not approve of me, did not come, and did not pay for anything. We had hamburgers at a drive-in afterward and called it a reception.

I have thought about that day more than Lisa would believe.

A few years in, she told me that when she was a girl she used to cut wedding dresses out of the Sears catalog and keep them in a shoebox under her bed.

She laughed when she told me. I did not laugh.

I remember thinking that I owed her a dress, and then I remember the years going by the way they do, with a mortgage and a baby and storm work, and I never paid it.

We had Emily when Lisa was twenty-nine, after a long wait and two losses I will not write about here.

We divorced when Emily was twelve. It was not anybody’s fault, or it was both of ours, which comes to about the same thing.

Lisa married Tom Kemper four years later. Tom sells seed corn and runs the sound board at their church in Sioux Falls, and he is a decent man.

Emily lived with them on school days and with me most weekends and every summer.

So when Emily got engaged, I knew what was coming. I knew there was a shoebox somewhere in Lisa’s heart.

And I knew Bonnie had decided, late in her life, that she was finally going to do a wedding right.