The waitress had just set the relish tray in the middle of the table when my husband decided to tell the bride’s family what kind of boy we had raised.
It was a Saturday in late April at the Bluff View Supper Club outside Viroqua. It had rained all afternoon, and the parking lot still shone under the yard light. Inside it smelled like the fryer and prime rib and the cedar polish they put on that wood paneling.
There were six of us at a round table by the window. Curtis and me, our son Wyatt, his fiancée Hannah Kvale, and Hannah’s parents, Lisa and Mark, who had driven over from Westby.
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The relish tray was the old kind, in a cut glass dish. Radishes on ice, celery sticks, whole green onions, and a little hill of green olives. Lisa said she hadn’t seen green onions on a relish tray since her own mother’s funeral lunch, and everybody laughed.
That was the last easy laugh of the night.
Curtis had ordered a brandy old-fashioned sweet, the way he has since before I knew him. He leaned back in his tan sport coat, the one he wears to co-op meetings and funerals, and turned his glass slowly on the tablecloth.
“Hannah,” he said, “did Wyatt tell you what we gave him toward the wedding?”
Hannah smiled at him. She is a sweet girl with long blonde hair, and that night she had on a pale pink dress she told me later she bought for the occasion. “He did,” she said. “Thank you both so much. It means a lot to us.”
“Five thousand dollars,” Curtis said. He wasn’t looking at Hannah anymore. He was looking at her parents.
I knew the tone. I had been married to it for twenty-nine years. It was the voice he uses at the co-op counter when a farmer tells him a field is fine and Curtis knows it isn’t.
“Ours cost seven thousand dollars,” he said. “That was 1997. Seven thousand dollars in 1997, and we paid every dime of it ourselves. Took us two years.”
Mark nodded politely. Lisa said something about how everything costs more now. Curtis acted like he didn’t hear her.
“My dad didn’t give me a nickel,” he went on. “Not one. He called it character. Said a man who can’t pay for his own wedding has no business having one.”
Wyatt set his fork down. “Dad,” he said.
Curtis didn’t stop. That is the thing I keep coming back to. Our son said his name, plain and quiet, and Curtis rolled right over him like a truck over a gopher hole.
“Kids today get handed everything,” he said. “Phones, cars, college. Then they want a barn wedding with a band and a photographer and a dessert table. I love him, but I’ll be the one to say it. Ours is spoiled.”