The Card of Thanks in the County Paper

The driver found me at the fairgrounds hall a little after nine, while the dollar dance was still going and the ceiling fans were pushing the warm June air around without cooling anything.

He was a polite man, maybe sixty, with a folded paper in one hand and his car keys in the other.

He asked if I was Sam Pedersen. I said I was, and I thanked him for coming, because I thought he was somebody’s uncle from Abby’s side.

“I’m with the car service out of Sioux City,” he said. “I’m about to run your stepmom back to the hotel. She said the groom was settling up for the day, so I wanted to get you the invoice before I head out.”

I looked at the paper. Six hours, a town car, a driver, the mileage up from Sioux City and back.

Seven hundred eighty dollars. At the bottom, in handwriting I knew from fifteen years of birthday cards, it said: groom pays.

Abby’s grandpa Hank was sitting at the end of the nearest table, three feet away, with his cane hooked over the chair back and a plate of cake on his knee. He was eighty-six.

He had driven up from Cherokee that morning with Abby’s grandma, and he had told me at the church that I looked like a man who would take care of his granddaughter.

Abby’s mom was cutting the last of the sheet cake. Her little cousins were sliding across the dance floor in their socks. All of them could hear me if I raised my voice.

I did not raise my voice. I folded the invoice in half and put it in the inside pocket of the suit coat I had rented in Spencer.

I shook the driver’s hand and told him to mail it to the address on the bottom, and that I would take care of it.

He thanked me and went out the side door, and through the window I watched him hold the back door of the car open for my stepmother.

Sherri was in a dress I had never seen before. It was a pale blue, long and fitted, with little beads sewn along the neckline that caught the light from the parking lot poles.

Her hair was done up in curls. She waved at the hall the way people wave from a parade float.

My dad was standing behind her on the gravel in his good gray suit, the one he had bought for my mother’s funeral eighteen years ago.

He kissed Sherri on the cheek, closed the car door for her, and walked back inside to help Abby’s dad with the chairs.

He did not know. I want to say that early, because it matters to everything after.

My father did not know one thing about what Sherri had ordered that weekend, and he did not know about the car until I told him myself.

Abby came up behind me a minute later and put her hand flat on my back, the way she does.

She had taken her veil off hours before, and her long dark hair was coming loose from the pins. She smelled like hairspray and the lilacs her aunt had cut for the tables.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“Nobody,” I said. “A driver. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

She looked at me for a long second. Abby teaches kindergarten. She can tell when a five-year-old has hidden a crayon in his shoe, and she could tell I had something in my pocket.

But she let it go, because it was our wedding night and her grandpa wanted one more dance.

I watched her dance with Hank, slow, his cane leaned against the wall, and I thought: whatever that paper is, it can wait. Whatever it costs, it is not going to cost her this.

That was the first one. There were ten more.