I never went to look. Drew drove past it on his way to work, and he told me once, at supper, that the big doors were closed with a chain through the handles, and the grass had come up through the gravel where the cars would have parked.
The six couples on the waiting list never called again. They had all heard. Eleven families had told eleven more, at the church and the Cenex and the Kwik Trip and the feed store, and the story had gone around the township and up into the next one, and every telling had the same plain facts and the same fourteen thousand dollars.
By November Norbert had sold twenty cows to carry his note at the bank. People said he was not seen at the Cenex coffee table that fall. People said that when he did come in, the table did not go quiet, exactly. It simply turned its talk to the weather.
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I do not know what he thought, sitting in that truck at the end of the Engstroms’ lane with the engine running. I know only that he came to the end of it, and he did not turn in, and he went home. I am a little sorry for the gray-faced man in that cab. I am not sorry for a single check I wrote.
The last wedding was the final Saturday in October, Hannah and Luke, a hundred and ten guests. I did the flowers out of the last brown sunflower heads and a bucket of red osier dogwood Wilbur cut from the creek bottom. When Hannah walked the aisle I stood at the back and watched her go, and I did not cry. I had run out.
That night, after the last of the chairs had been carried back to the church and the cream cans had been washed and stacked, I drove home alone, because Drew was helping Wilbur tarp the loft.
I sat at the kitchen counter and opened the black binder. Eleven stubs. Nine for a thousand and two for twenty-five hundred, every one made out to Kowalski Farms and every one of them marked, in my own handwriting, with the date I had written the refund.
I took a pen and wrote one more line at the bottom of the page, under the total.
Eleven weddings. Eleven days finished. Balance in savings, $912.
In January Vera Engstrom called me about the next season. Fourteen couples had come to her, unprompted, from the waiting list and from the weddings, and she and Wilbur wanted to do it properly. She wanted a booking account at the bank, in her name and Wilbur’s, with a second signature.
“Whose?” I said.
“Yours,” said Vera. “If you’ll take it. And we’ll show you the account every first of the month, so you never wonder.”
I told her I would be honored. And then I did a thing I should have done three summers before at Norbert’s kitchen table. I asked to see the account, and I looked at every line, and I put my initials beside the balance.
That night I hung the black binder on the shelf in my shop, beside the order books and the ribbon, with a fresh page in the front. On the first line I wrote the Engstroms’ names. Underneath it I wrote, as I do for every bride, the date of the first Saturday in September.
Then I turned off the light, and went home to my husband.