Tonya found out first, standing at the vending machine in the break room with her hairnet still on and a dollar bill going soft in her fingers.
I was across the table, working a cramp out of my left foot. It was a Wednesday morning, 9:40, and we had eleven minutes left of a thirty-minute break.
“Kayla, hon,” she said. “Your shower got canceled.” I thought she was kidding. Tonya jokes about everything, up to and including her own divorce.
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“My aunt Wanda books the Legion hall,” she said. “Your mother-in-law called her Monday and pulled the whole thing.” I laughed, because it was a mistake, and mistakes are funny for about two seconds. Then I stopped laughing.
“She said you called it off,” Tonya said. “She said you were too worn out for a party.” I was thirty-three weeks along. I was standing in white rubber boots that had gotten tight in the ankle weeks ago. I had not called anything off.
I had not been asked anything at all.
What Donna had done
My husband’s mother is named Donna Hollis, and she is sixty-four years old. She types her thank-you notes on a manual typewriter and keeps a paper church fan in her purse, and she had run the whole thing herself from the start.
Back in September she told me, over a pot roast at her table, that the shower was her gift to me. She would book the Legion hall. She would do the invitations. She would handle the cake and the punch and the paper plates with the little storks on them.
I said thank you. I meant it, too. I come from a family that had not thrown a party for anything since my granddaddy’s funeral, and I took her offer for what it looked like.
It was four hundred dollars for the room. She put a hundred and fifty down to hold the date, and Wanda told Tonya the rest was due at the door.
On Monday, Donna had called to cancel. The Legion gives a deposit back when the date can be rebooked, and Wanda had a bridal club waiting for that Saturday, so the room was gone in an hour.
The hall secretary handed Donna her hundred and fifty back in cash across the counter. That detail was the one that stayed with me. It was not the hundred and fifty dollars. It was that she had gone in person, and stood there, and taken it.
“Did she say anything else?” I asked Tonya.
“Wanda said she was real nice about it,” Tonya said. “That’s what bothered Wanda.”