Daddy turned around. “What?”
“The supper. What did you buy?”
“Roast beef. Cheesy potatoes. Green beans, slaw, rolls.” He said it like he was reading off a parts list at the plant. “A hundred and forty plates at thirty-five dollars a plate. Connie put the beef in at six this morning.”
“And the band?”
“Fifteen hundred. They’re already set up. I saw their trailer when I drove by at noon.”
“So that’s what,” Grandma said. “Sixty-four hundred dollars?”
“Yes ma’am. Sixty-four hundred.”
“Paid?”
“Paid Tuesday.”
Grandma June was eighty-four. She has a hip that came from a hospital in Wichita and a cane she mostly uses for pointing at things. She pointed it at me now.
“Then there’s a hot supper for a hundred and forty people sitting four blocks from here. Bought and paid for by your father. And there’s a hundred and forty people in that sanctuary who put on their good clothes and drove in from all over creation and haven’t had a bite since noon.”
She let that sit in the air.
“Your cousin Mark came all the way from Amarillo. The Hendersons are in their eighties and they drove up from Coffeyville. I don’t know what you want to do, sugar. But I know what’s going to waste if you do nothing.”
Daddy was looking at me.
“It’s yours,” he said quietly. “I didn’t buy that supper for him. I bought it for you. You tell me what you want done with it, and I’ll do it.”
I turned and looked at myself in the mirror.
Thirty-one years old. Dark hair pinned up by a girl at the salon on Main Street who told me that morning I looked just like my mother. A plain white dress. No beading. White satin heels that had been pinching my toes since two o’clock.
I thought about the other choice.
Pastor Dale going out front and saying something soft. A hundred and forty people filing past me on their way to the parking lot with their eyes on the floor. Me lying on my old bed at Daddy’s house in this dress. And four blocks away, a woman named Connie scraping roast beef into black trash bags.
I thought about Lorna’s envelope too. I could have sent Tammy back out to that car with a sentence of my own. Believe me, I had a few ready. But a sentence wasn’t going to feed the Hendersons. And it wasn’t going to make me feel one bit less left.
“Beth,” I said. “Hand me my bag. The blue one.”
In the blue bag were the white canvas sneakers I’d bought for dancing at the reception.
I took off the satin heels. I set them side by side under the bench, neat, the way you’d leave something you weren’t coming back for. I put on the sneakers, and I tied them in double knots.
Grandma June watched me do it.
“One more thing,” she said. “Don’t you dare send that band home.”
“Grandma.”
“I mean it.”
She planted her cane and pushed herself up out of the chair.
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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