At 3:20, Derrick’s brother Jeff came to the door instead.
Jeff was the best man. He was in his gray suit, and the flower pinned to his lapel had already started to wilt. He held his phone out to me like it was something that had died in his hand.
There was a text on the screen from Derrick. It had come in at 3:17.
I can’t. Tell her I’m sorry.
That was it. Six words. And he hadn’t even sent them to me.
I called him. People have asked me since why I didn’t just get the man on the phone and talk to him. I did try. I called him eleven times in twenty minutes. It went straight to voicemail every single time. His voice, cheerful, saying leave a message. You can’t talk sense into a man who won’t pick up.
Jeff had better luck. He kept dialing, over and over, and inside the hour Derrick answered him. Once.
He was sitting in his pickup out at the lake. The spot where he liked to fish. He wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t in a ditch somewhere. He just wouldn’t come.
Then he hung up on his own brother and turned his phone off.
So that’s where things stood when his mother sent her envelope in.
A hundred and forty people sitting in the sanctuary. An organist on her third trip through the same four hymns. A groom in a pickup truck at the lake.
And a bill.
My father came in next. He must have passed Tammy in the hallway.
Daddy’s name is Ray. He was sixty-six that fall. He worked maintenance at the cement plant for thirty-one years, and he drove a fuel tanker in the Gulf War in 1991. He is not a talker.
He had on the first new suit he’d bought since my mother’s funeral. Charcoal gray. He’d let Beth pin a rose on it that morning. And he looked like exactly what he was. A man who had been standing at the back of a church for forty minutes, ready to walk his daughter down the aisle.
He looked at the envelope in my hand.
“What’s that?”
I gave it to him. He read it the way he reads everything. Slow. Chin tucked down. Then he read it a second time.
“Lorna sent this.”
“She sent Tammy with it.”
“Today.”
“Just now.”
He folded the envelope once, carefully, and put it in the inside pocket of his suit coat. His hand wasn’t quite steady doing it.
“Jeff says he’s out at the lake,” Daddy said. “I can be in the truck in two minutes.”
“And do what?”
“I’d think of something on the way.”
“Daddy.”
“I would.”
“I know you would. That’s exactly why you’re not going.”
I sat back down on the bench, because my knees had quit on me.
“If you have to go fetch a man and drag him back here,” I said, “I don’t want what you’d be bringing.”
He stood there a long time. I could see him wanting to argue with me and not finding any place to start.
Then Grandma June spoke up from her chair by the radiator.
“Raymond. What’s Connie got in the warmers over at the hall?”
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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