The Envelope at the Mother Daughter Dance

The Dance

Natalie’s father should have had a dance with her. That was the hole in the middle of the whole day, and everybody knew it, and nobody said it.

When she and Levi were planning the reception, she had come to me in the kitchen one night and asked if I would do a mother-daughter dance instead.

She said it quick, like pulling off a bandage. I said yes before she finished asking.

She picked the song. It was an old Anne Murray song that Tom used to whistle in the machine shed when he was working on something and thought nobody was listening.

Natalie had heard him whistle it a thousand times and never knew the name of it until she was grown.

The boy running the music, a young man from Waseca with a laptop and two speakers on stands, called for it a little before seven.

He said, “And now the bride would like to share a dance with her mom,” and the whole barn went soft.

The string lights were on up in the rafters, hundreds of little gold bulbs strung back and forth across the old beams.

The sun was getting low behind the tree line past the big open doors, and the light inside the barn had gone that warm golden color that makes everyone look ten years younger.

People turned their chairs around at the tables to watch. I saw Levi standing at the edge of the floor with his hands in his pockets.

I saw Warren and his wife Jan at their table, and Chelsea and her husband next to them.

And I saw my father, sitting at a round table at the edge of the dance floor by himself.

He had been at the head table for supper. But after supper the young people had all gone to the bar and the photo booth, and the older folks had drifted to the dessert table, and somehow by the time the dance started Dad was sitting alone in a chair at the end of an empty table with his hands folded, in his brown suit, watching.

Natalie came out onto the floor and took my hand. The song started. We had practiced it twice in my kitchen, and we still were not any good at it.

We just held on and swayed and turned in a slow circle, the way you dance with somebody you love when neither of you knows how.

“You okay, Mama?” she whispered. She had not called me Mama since she was in grade school.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Are you?”

“I’m good,” she said. “I’m so good.”

Halfway through the song I took the envelope out of my pocket and slipped it into her hand behind my back where nobody could see.

“Don’t open it till we’re turning,” I said.

She opened it right away, of course. She has never once in her life waited to open anything.

She held it over my shoulder where she could see it in the light, and I felt her go still against me.

“Mom,” she said. “Mom. What is this.”

“It’s a check,” I said.

“I can see it’s a check. It’s from Uncle Warren. Mom, it’s for nine thousand eight hundred dollars.”