The Backyard Wedding Under the Cottonwood

Greg called on a Sunday afternoon in April, and Abby put him on speaker because her hands were full of my dish towel. I was at the sink rinsing the roaster from dinner. I heard every word before either of us thought to take him off.

“Eighteen thousand,” he said. “The country club in Watertown. The whole thing. Dinner for a hundred and fifty, the bar, the band, the flowers. I already talked to their event girl. She’s holding the second Saturday in September.”

Abby’s face went bright the way it used to when he showed up on a Saturday with a new bike in the back of a demo truck. I smiled at her and kept my hands in the water.

“Dad, that’s so much,” she said. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. There’s just one thing.” He cleared his throat. Greg always cleared his throat before he said the part of a deal he knew you would not like. Seventeen years after the divorce, I still knew that sound better than I knew my own doorbell.

“Brittany’s going to walk in as the mother of the bride,” he said. “She’ll sit up front with me. Your mom can sit in the third row. It’s not a slight to anybody. It’s just how it looks best.”

The water ran over my hands. I turned it off. The kitchen got very quiet, and I could hear the clock over the stove, the one shaped like a rooster that Abby bought me at a craft fair when she was eleven.

Abby did not look at me. She looked at the phone on the counter. Her mouth was a straight line, and for one second she looked exactly like Greg at thirty, which nobody ever tells her and I never will.

“Abby?” he said. “You there?”

“I’m here.” She took a breath. “Thank you, Dad. Really. That’s a lot of money, and I know you mean it. We’ll figure it out.”

“What’s that mean, figure it out?”

“It means thank you,” she said. “And no. I love you. I have to go.”

She ended the call and set the phone face down on my counter, gently, like it was something that might break. Then she folded my dish towel into a perfect square, set it next to the phone, and went out the back door and sat on the steps.

The man who left

I want to be fair to Greg, because Abby has always been fair to him, and she learned it somewhere.

Greg Haugen left when Abby was nine. He did not leave for anybody. The dealership his dad started was going under, and he worked eighty hours a week to save it, and came home a man none of us recognized, including him.

One night in February he packed a duffel bag and moved into the apartment over the service bays. He said it was for a little while. It was for good.

He saved the dealership. I will give him that. Haugen Motors in Watertown sells more trucks now than it ever did, and Greg is on the billboard out on Highway 212 with his arms crossed.

What he never figured out was how to come back through the door he walked out of. So he tried to buy a different door. A pink Jeep on her sixteenth birthday. Checks with too many zeroes.

He paid for her dental hygiene school in full, and I was grateful for that and still am.

What she never got was a sentence that started with “I’m sorry.” Not once in seventeen years. I don’t think Greg knows the words. I think somebody would have to teach him, and the only people who could have were the two he left.

He married Brittany six years ago. She worked the front desk at a chiropractor’s office in Watertown. She is pretty and careful and always a little overdressed, like somebody who expects to be graded. I have spoken maybe a hundred words to her in six years.