“Twenty-two years I been playing weddings,” Sonny said. “Every Saturday, April to October. Two, three a month. You know how many times the bride came out and fed me first?”
I shook my head.
“None,” he said. “Not one time. Not ever.”
He looked back down at the pans.
“I’ve played for doctors and I’ve played for lawyers. I’ve played in a barn with a dirt floor. The band eats last, or the band eats in the truck. Every single time. For twenty-two years.”
His voice did a thing then. This big man, with hands like a farrier, and his voice came apart just a little at the edge of it.
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“No bride ever fed me first,” he said. “Not till tonight.”
He picked up a paper plate finally. He put one slice of brisket on it, and one roll, and nothing else. A man who had learned a long time ago not to take too much, because taking too much was how you got looked at.
“Son,” the gray-bearded guitar player said to him, soft, “you can have more than that. Look at it all.”
Sonny looked at me to make sure. I nodded. He put a second slice on, and then a scoop of beans, and he ate standing up by the open van door like he half expected somebody to come take the plate back.
Nobody did. I made sure of that. I stood right there beside him with my own plate until he had finished the whole thing and gone back for more without asking anybody first.
The Tailgate
They ate on that tailgate for a long time.
Word got around the way word does at a wedding. A few of the guests drifted out into the lot with their cake. Then a few more came.
Nobody said out loud what had almost happened. Because by then it was not about what Verlene had done. It was about a wedding where the band and the busboys were eating under the string lights, and the night was warm, and nobody was in a hurry to end it.
Somebody carried a church table out and set it up by the van. Somebody else brought the big jug of sweet tea and a stack of the foam cups. The casseroles with the cracker tops got opened up, and the creamed corn, and it turned into the kind of supper nobody had planned and everybody would remember.
The June bugs batted at the one pole light over the lot. Off past the gravel you could hear the crickets going in the bean field behind the church. It smelled like smoke and cut grass and somebody’s gardenias.