“Lorna,” I said. “You sat with me in Wichita.”
She shook her head. “Don’t.”
“Six nights. You brought me a toothbrush. You are not going to be that envelope to me. I’ve got four years of you to pick from. And I get to pick.”
She put her hand over her mouth.
I reached down into the blue bag that Beth had tucked under the table for me. In the side pocket was the little ring box. The original one. Dark green leather gone soft at the corners, with the name of a jeweler in Independence that closed before I was born.
I’d brought it to the church that morning. You move your engagement ring to your right hand for the ceremony, and I hadn’t trusted myself not to lose it in all the commotion.
I had already washed my hands at the kitchen sink with Connie’s dish soap. Now I slid the ring off my finger. It left a pale stripe of skin behind.
I wiped it carefully with a clean corner of my napkin, the way I’d told her I would. I set it in the slot. I closed the lid. And I slid the little box across the white plastic tablecloth until it touched her fingers.
“That’s your mother’s,” I said. “It was a privilege to wear it.”
She didn’t pick it up right away. She laid her hand over it, flat, and just left it there.
“Mother would have liked you,” she said. “She’d have liked you better than she’d like me today.”
“She’d have liked your noodles.”
It was a poor joke. She laughed anyway. One wet, broken laugh.
And then she did the thing I’ll still remember when I’ve forgotten all the rest of it. She picked up her fork, cut the corner off that piece of cake, and ate it.
“Deb made this?”
“She did.”
“It’s good,” Lorna said, crying. “It’s real good.”
She stayed until the band quit at nine o’clock.
What was left of the roast beef went into foam takeout boxes. The auxiliary ladies took one stack around to the shut-ins on their list and another stack out to the veterans at the nursing home. Harold Dawson went home with three boxes that he claimed were for a neighbor.
Daddy and I were the last ones out. He locked up with his post key, and then we sat down together on the concrete steps out front. Him in his charcoal suit. Me in a wedding dress with gravy down the front and flower petals stuck to the hem.
It had turned cold. You could smell somebody cutting soybeans east of town.
We sat there a while without saying anything.
“Well,” Daddy said finally. “I’ve been to worse weddings.”
I laughed so hard I had to put my head down between my knees.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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