The Toast at the End of the Dock

Somebody had strung lights on posts all down the dock, not switched on yet, while the sun sat low and orange over Grand Lake and somebody’s speaker played George Strait up on the lawn.

I was standing out on that dock in a sleeveless navy sundress with a glass of iced tea sweating in my hand.

Behind me the water went on for miles, flat and gold. A rented pontoon boat knocked softly against the last post.

Up the slope, about forty people sat in folding chairs with paper plates in their laps. My mother. My aunts.

Cousins from Vinita and Pryor and Afton. My brother-in-law, Carl. And in the middle of all of it, my sister Heidi, turning forty.

My mother had just called out over the music, “Anybody want to say something for our girl?” Nobody moved.

So I picked up my tea and walked out onto the dock, because I had been waiting three days to say one sentence.

I knew what that party cost. Not close to the dollar. To the dollar. Four thousand five hundred, and it had come out of my emergency fund.

My name is Wendy Pratt. I’m thirty-three, I clean teeth for a living at a family dental office in Claremore, and I am the kind of person who keeps an emergency fund because I have watched what happens to people who don’t.

I want to tell this honestly, including the parts where I don’t come off very well, because I’ve told it to myself enough times in the pretty version and it never helps.

It started in January, when the cold snap came through and Carl got laid off.

Carl Lowe is a pipe fitter. He’s forty-two, a big quiet man with forearms like fence posts, and he had worked steady for nine years at a plant out in the industrial park east of Pryor.

His hours got cut all fall. Then the plant cut a whole shift in January, and Carl was on it.

He went back to the union hall the next morning and signed the out-of-work list like you’re supposed to.

The hall told him spring, maybe. Turnarounds pick up when the weather warms. He collected unemployment and took every side job anybody offered him.

It was not enough. Heidi worked part time at the school cafeteria in Pryor, and her check was small, and their house payment ate most of what came in. The first thing to slip was the car.

Heidi called me on a Sunday night at the end of January. I was sitting on my front porch steps in a coat, because my house is small and the porch is where I go to think.

She was crying so hard I couldn’t understand her for the first minute.

“We’re two behind on the Equinox,” she finally said. “Three eighty-nine a month. They sent a letter. Wendy, I can’t lose that car. I can’t get to work without it, and Carl’s using the truck for every job he can find.”

I asked her what Carl said. She went quiet. “Carl doesn’t know how far behind we are,” she said. “He’s got enough on him. Please don’t tell him. He would die of shame. You know how he is.”