The Shower Held by the River

The cars

I braced for Donna’s silver Buick. It was Mitch’s truck, the gray Silverado with the dent in the tailgate, coming slow down the gravel with its blinker on, as if somebody might stop him.

Behind it came a green Impala I knew. Behind that, a white pickup with a ladder rack. Behind that, a minivan, then another truck, then a car I did not recognize, then more. They came down to the river one at a time and parked along the edge of the lot until the gravel ran out and they parked in the grass.

I counted eleven vehicles before I stopped counting.

People started getting out. Men in church jackets, women in good slacks, a gang of teenagers in hoodies, and a very old man whose walker two boys lifted out of a trunk. Every one of them was a Hollis, or married to one, or had been fed at a Hollis table.

I knew them from my own wedding. I had stood beside them in a receiving line while Donna looked at her watch.

My heart went up into my throat. I thought: they came to tell me I was wrong about her. I thought: they came to take sides.

Mitch walked across the grass ahead of all of them with his hands out of his pockets. He did not look at the crowd. He looked at me, and when he got to my chair he knelt down, which is not easy for a man his size, and put his forehead against my knee.

“She wouldn’t talk to me,” he said, very low. “I knocked on her door at seven-thirty. She was in her housecoat. She said she’d done what she thought best, and she wasn’t going to be discussed on her own porch. Then she shut the door.”

“Oh, Mitch.”

“So I went to Aunt Rosalie’s.” He lifted his head. His eyes were red. “I sat in her kitchen and I told her the whole thing, the way you told it to me. Then she got on the phone.”

What Rosalie said

Rosalie Thiel is Donna’s baby sister, a round, sixty-one-year-old woman who teaches the Sunday school class and has never once been seen without lipstick. She came across the grass with a covered casserole in both hands and her chin set.

She did not hug me. She stopped in front of my chair, in front of all fourteen women and the crockpots, and said it loud enough that the back row could hear.

“Kayla, I told every one of these people you’d called it off,” she said. “I said it at church. I said it on the phone. I said it because my sister told me so, and I believed her, and I never once picked up the phone to ask you.”

“Rosalie, you didn’t know.”

“I should have.” She set the casserole down. “I’ve been sorry since nine o’clock this morning, and I’m going to keep on being sorry in front of everyone who heard me say it.”

She turned around. “Y’all hear that?” she said to the crowd, in her Sunday school voice. “The girl did not cancel anything. Wanda Burris at the Legion has the booking card with Donna’s name on it. Donna pulled that hall herself.”

Nobody said a word. A teenager in the back took his hat off.

Rosalie lowered her voice again, for me. “I’ll tell you why, because you deserve to know, and because I’m not going to cover for her. She was waiting on Jenna’s baby. She’s been saying since the funeral that Cyrus’s first grandchild would come from a house she picked.”

“Jenna’s not due until March,” I said.

“I know it.” She shook her head. “My sister has been counting that baby since the day Fritz got engaged. And then you came along and beat her to it by three months, and she could not stand it.”

I let that settle. I had asked myself a hundred times why a grown woman would do a thing like that. It was not a better reason than I’d imagined. It was just a smaller one, and sadder, and it belonged to someone who wasn’t there.