The Song Two Hundred Guests Finished

The workbench

My name is Eloise. I am twenty-seven years old, and I fix tractors at the equipment dealer on the edge of Greensburg.

I have done it since I was nineteen, and I am good at it.

My dad, Wiley, taught me how to hold a wrench before I could ride a bike.

He farmed four hundred acres of corn and beans with my uncle, and he never once told me a shop was no place for a girl.

When he got sick, it went fast. Pancreatic cancer. The doctor in Indianapolis gave him six months and he got a little under five.

He spent most of the good days of it out in his shop with a space heater and the radio on.

I was dating Whit by then. Whit was a lineman for the rural electric co-op, quiet and steady, the kind of man who checks your tire pressure without being asked.

My dad liked him right away, which was not like my dad.

One afternoon in February, eleven weeks before he died, Dad was sitting on a stool at his workbench with a blanket over his knees.

I was rebuilding a carburetor on an old Farmall for a neighbor, and the radio played “My Girl.”

Dad listened to the whole thing without saying a word.

When it ended, he cleared his throat and said, “That one. When you get married. That’s ours, kiddo. Don’t let anybody talk you out of it.”

I told him he would be there to dance it himself.

He gave me that look he had, patient and a little sorry for me, and said, “If I’m not, Woody will do it. I already asked him. He said yes before I finished.”

I went out to my truck after that and cried so hard I had to wipe the windshield fog off with my sleeve.

Then I went back in and finished the carburetor, because Dad would have asked me if I had.

He died that spring, in the hospital bed we set up in the front room so he could see the yard. He was fifty-nine.

Whit proposed two years later, out on the tailgate of his truck at the county fair, after the demolition derby. I said yes before he finished, too. Some things run in families.

Paula

Whit’s mother is Paula. She was seventy that fall, a retired school bookkeeper from Rushville, with short gray curls she has set every week at the same shop on Main Street.

Paula is organized in a way that can feel like a fence. She keeps her recipes in a binder with plastic sleeves.

She writes her grocery list by aisle. She once returned a casserole dish to me with a note taped on it about soaking.

Whit’s dad, Willard, died six years before our wedding. He had a heart attack in the hay field on a hot July afternoon, and by the time the neighbor found him on the ground beside the baler, there was nothing anyone could do.

Whit was twenty-one. He told me about it on our third date, in a booth at a little diner in Rushville, very plainly, the way you would tell somebody where you went to high school.

I knew right then how much it still hurt him.

Paula never talked about Willard with me. Not once in three years.

There were pictures of him in her hallway, and his seed cap still hung on a hook by her back door, but if I mentioned him she would straighten something and change the subject.

When we started planning the wedding, Paula offered to pay for the DJ. Nine hundred dollars.

It was generous, and Whit and I were paying for nearly everything else ourselves, so I said thank you and meant it.

Then she asked Alonzo for a list.

Not my list. Her list. She wanted every song he planned to play, in order, printed out, and she wanted to look it over.

She sent it back to him with three songs crossed off and a note in the margin that said, “Please keep to this. Thank you, Paula.”

Whit laughed about it when Alonzo forwarded the email. “That’s Mom,” he said.

“She’d put the weather on a schedule if she could.” I laughed too. I was not worried. I had my own plan.