Tammy wouldn’t come all the way into the room.
She stood in the doorway of the bride’s room at the church with one hand on the frame. She was wearing the sage green dress I had picked out for her back in June. And she stared at the carpet the whole time she talked.
“Mom says you ought to give the ring back today. Before anybody goes home.”
I was sitting on the little bench in front of the mirror. My bouquet was in my lap. I had been holding it so long that the wet stems had left a damp spot on the front of my dress.
“All right,” I said.
“And she says.” Tammy stopped. She swallowed hard. “She says the family is out nine thousand dollars. For the rehearsal supper at the steakhouse last night, and for the cruise. She says she expects you to make that right. Since it was all done for you.”
Behind me, in the folding chair by the radiator, my Grandma June set her cane down flat on the floor.
That was the only sound in the room.
“Nine thousand,” I said.
“She wrote it down.”
Tammy held out a church offering envelope. On the back, in pencil, in the neat, square numbers of a woman who had kept the books at the lumberyard for twenty-six years, it said:
Rehearsal supper 2,100. Honeymoon cruise 6,900. Total 9,000.
The wedding dinner wasn’t on there. She couldn’t put that on there. My father had paid for the wedding dinner.
I took the envelope. I don’t know why. I think because somebody handed me something, and my mother raised me to take what I was handed and say thank you.
“Thank you, Tammy.”
“Amy Jo, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to be the one. She’s out in the car and she won’t come in, and she said if I didn’t tell you, she would.”
“I know you didn’t want to.”
“He’s my brother,” Tammy said, “and I could wring his neck.”
“I know that too.”
She was twenty-six years old and her mascara had run halfway down her face. I got up and hugged her. Bouquet and envelope and all. Then she went back down the hall carrying her heels in her hand.
It was 3:41 in the afternoon. I know because the clock in the bride’s room was one of those old school clocks with a red second hand, and I had been watching it go around since three o’clock.
Three o’clock was when I was supposed to walk down the aisle.
Here’s how you find out your groom isn’t coming.
Nobody tells you. Not at first.
At three o’clock, the organist was still playing the music she plays while people are being seated. At five after three, she started the same four hymns over again from the beginning. My maid of honor, my cousin Beth, kept slipping out to check and coming back in with a different look on her face every time.
At 3:10 she said the boys were running a little behind.
At 3:20 she didn’t say anything at all.
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