Marcia was sixty-six, a widow, and a retired bookkeeper for the grain elevator in town. She kept her house the way she kept the books, every cushion square, every plant watered on Tuesday.
She had always been polite to me. She had never been warm to the kids. I had noticed that and put it down to her being a town person who did not know what to do with six children at once.
So there I stood in the garden that August afternoon, with the sunflowers taller than both of us, and my future mother-in-law telling me, kindly, to leave them home.
I want to say I said something sharp. I did not. I said, “Let me think about it, Marcia,”
and I walked her back to her car, and I waved as she backed out of the yard.
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Then I went into the barn and sat on an overturned bucket for a long while.
People who have heard this story always ask me the same thing. Why didn’t you just tell her no? Why didn’t you tell her to keep her money?
Here is my answer, plain. I could not pay for that reception without her. And under all of it, I wanted Luke’s mother at our wedding, glad to be there, not sitting in the back with her purse in her lap because I had picked a fight in August. So I did not argue. I just changed who walked.
But I did not know that yet, sitting on the bucket. Right then I only knew that I felt sick.
Luke was gone that week. A line of storms had come through the Dakotas and the co-op had sent a crew west to help restore power.
He was sleeping in a motel in Mobridge and working sixteen-hour days, and when he called at night he was so tired he could barely finish a sentence.
I did not tell him. I thought about it every night when the phone rang, and every night I heard how worn out he sounded, and I thought, this is his mother, and he is three hundred miles away up a pole, and he can’t fix it from there.
So I kept it. That was my choice, and maybe it was the wrong one.
The person I did not keep it from was Kayla, because Kayla had heard the whole thing from the porch.
She found me in the barn about an hour later. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, the way she does when she is trying to look like she doesn’t care.
“We’re not going, are we,” she said. It was not really a question.
“You’re going,” I said.
“She said we aren’t really yours.” Kayla looked at the floor. “She’s not wrong, Becca. We’re not. I’m going to age out in three years. Abby and Lily might go back to their aunt in Fargo. Everybody knows that. She just said it out loud.”
I stood up off that bucket. I took her by both shoulders, gently, and I made her look at me.
“Listen to me,” I said. “You are in my house, and you are in my life, and nobody in this county gets to decide you don’t count on my wedding day. Not Marcia. Not anybody. Do you understand?”