The Card of Thanks in the County Paper

Sherri’s reason

“I got married the first time when I was nineteen,” Sherri said.

“At the courthouse in Le Mars, on my lunch hour. I was working at a gas station. He was twenty. My mother wouldn’t come. She said if I was going to throw my life away, she wasn’t going to put on a dress and watch.”

She turned the coffee cup in her hands.

“I wore my jeans and a sweater from the Pamida. We had a hamburger after. He left when I was twenty-three, and I don’t regret leaving that behind, but I always thought, someday, I’ll get the real one. The dress and the flowers and somebody doing my hair.”

“And then your dad,” she said, and she looked over at him.

“Your dad was the best thing that ever happened to me, Sam. But he’d already had the church wedding. He’d already done the big day with your mom. So we went to the courthouse on a Tuesday. And I told myself it didn’t matter.”

She looked down at the check on the table.

“When you two got engaged, something in me just, I don’t know. I started ordering things. The dress first. Then the room. Every time I did it, I felt like I was nineteen and getting the real one. And I told myself the groom’s side always pays, because my mother always said that, and I knew you’d be all right. You always are.”

“That’s not fair to him,” Dad said quietly from the counter. It was the only thing he said the whole time.

“No,” Sherri said. “It’s not. I know it’s not.”

She was crying now, but quietly. Abby passed her a napkin. Sherri wiped her eyes and laughed a little at herself.

“I let myself have a wedding through yours,” she said to Abby.

“That’s the plain truth of it. I took something that was supposed to be yours and I put my name on it, and I made you pay for it. I’m so sorry, honey.”

Abby did not say it was fine. I loved her for that. She reached across the table and put her hand on top of Sherri’s, and she left it there.

“Thank you for telling us,” Abby said.

The rest of that summer

They stayed for an hour. Dad and I walked out to look at the grove, where a windbreak of old cottonwoods was starting to come down in the storms, and talked about chainsaws and nothing else, which is how men in my family say the important things.

When we came back, Sherri and Abby were looking through our wedding pictures on Abby’s laptop.

The talk in the county lasted a couple of weeks, and then it moved on, the way talk does.

Sherri went back to the treasurer’s office the next Monday. I heard she told the women in the break room herself that she had paid her half, before anybody could ask.

That took more nerve than anything I did with the card of thanks.

Dad’s check and Sherri’s check went into Abby’s savings account the next week. Six thousand four hundred dollars back where it started. The house money, whole.

It would be nice to say that was the end of what it cost. It was not.

Sherri and I lost something that summer, and we have been rebuilding it by hand ever since, the way you fix a fence.