The Pans I Carried to the Band

Out On The Dance Floor

Here is the part where you are going to want me to go back inside and get somebody.

That is what you are supposed to do. Walk back into that fellowship hall, find my daddy, find Reed, find the preacher. Point at the truck. Say the words out loud and let a man handle it.

I thought about it. I stood there in my gown with my feet freezing on the gravel and I thought hard about going to get my father.

But my daddy was out on that dance floor with my mother.

I could see them both through the propped-open doors, in the gold light, under the string lights the youth group had hung that morning. My mother had her head laid on my daddy’s shoulder and her eyes were shut.

She was not even really dancing. She was swaying. Just leaning on the man she married thirty years ago, at her only daughter’s wedding, while the fiddle played something slow.

She did not know yet.

She had cooked for three days. She had walked me down an aisle she decorated herself because there was no money for a planner. And right then, for about four minutes, she was not a lunch lady or the mother of the bride. She was a woman being held by her husband, resting.

I was not going to walk out onto that floor and tap her on the shoulder and tell her that Reed’s aunt was carrying her supper off in a truck. I was not going to put that on her face. Not tonight. Not on this one night.

And this was not a thing you call the law over. It was a wedding. It was family.

Verlene was going to be sitting at every Thanksgiving table I would ever set for the rest of my life. I knew that even standing there in the dark. You do not call the sheriff to a wedding. You do not make the first photograph anybody remembers be of a woman in handcuffs by the hymnal rack.

There was another reason too, and I might as well say it plain. If I went and got my daddy, it would become his wedding and his trouble to fix. It had been his and my mother’s money and their three days, but this one thing, this choice in the dark, I wanted it to be mine.

I was a wife now, as of that afternoon. A woman grown. If I could not decide what to do with a pan of my own mother’s brisket on my own wedding night, I did not have any business being either one of those things.

So I did not go get a man. And I did not make a scene. And I did not let her finish, either.

I reached past her into the back of that Tahoe. I took out the pan of brisket. I put it in my own two arms.

“What on earth are you doing,” Verlene said.

“I’m feeding the band,” I said.