The Pans I Carried to the Band

The Fiddle Player Sonny

The two busboys were the Hollis boys. Caleb and Dylan. Fourteen and fifteen, in white shirts their mother had ironed stiff.

They had been hired on for twenty dollars apiece to bus tables, haul the trash, and keep the tea pitchers full. They had worked since five o’clock that afternoon.

They had not eaten either. Nobody had thought once about them. Nobody ever thinks about the help at a wedding.

“You boys too,” I said. “Get a plate. Sit down and eat.”

They looked at me like I might be setting a trap. Fourteen and fifteen, and already they knew that when a grown-up at a party tells you to help yourself, it usually means there is a mess coming your way right after.

“Go on,” Reed said. “She means it. Load up.”

Caleb, the older one, told me later they had split a bag of chips from the gas station on the drive over and that was all either of them had eaten since lunch at school. They had been too busy hauling folding tables all afternoon to think about it until the smell of that brisket hit them.

They loaded plates the way boys that age do, which is to say the food was stacked an inch over the rim and a roll was already in each of their mouths before they had sat down on the bumper.

The bass girl got a plate. The drummer got two. The gray-bearded guitar player filled one slow and careful, and then he bowed his head and said a blessing over it by himself before he took a single bite. I had to look away from that one.

Sonny, the fiddle player, was the last to come to the tailgate.

He set his fiddle back in its case in the van first. Latched it. The way a man puts up a tool he respects before he does anything else.

Then he came and stood over all that food. And he did not reach for it.

He looked at it a long moment. Then he looked at me, standing there in my gown with brisket grease already on the hem, the kind of stain my mother would have had a fit about, and I did not care one bit.