Harold was ninety-one years old. He was at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea when he was nineteen, and he has sat at the same end of the bar at the VFW post since before I was born. He was wearing a brown suit that I believe he got married in.
“Well,” he said. Loud, because he doesn’t hear well. “I never turned down a roast beef in my life.”
And people laughed.
They laughed the way you laugh when you’ve been holding your breath too long. And then they started standing up.
My niece Emma was six, and she was my flower girl. She came over and tugged on my dress. Her little basket was still full.
“Aunt Amy Jo? Do I still get to throw my petals?”
“You surely do,” I said. “You can throw them at the hall. You can throw them wherever you want.”
If you’ve never been in the VFW hall in Chanute, Kansas, it looks like every VFW hall you’ve ever been in. Brown paneling. Drop ceiling. The flags lined up along the west wall, and the black POW flag by the door. A kitchen with a pass-through window. And the canteen on the other side of a door that stays shut during family doings.
The post had let Daddy have the hall for just the cleaning deposit. Thirty years of dues and Friday fish fries will get you that.
The auxiliary ladies had been in there Friday with Beth and me, and they’d done what could be done. White paper streamers swagged from the middle of the ceiling out to the corners. Long rows of tables with white plastic covers and mason jars full of mums from Aunt Deb’s yard. A head table across the front with twelve chairs.
On the two chairs in the middle, somebody had tied big white bows.
I untied one of them myself and stuck it in a mason jar.
Connie met me at the kitchen door. She runs the cafe out on the highway and caters out of the back of it. She had four high school girls in black aprons and six steam pans going. She already knew. In a town of nine thousand people, news can get across four blocks faster than a bride can.
“Honey,” she said. “You tell me what you want. I can hold it. I can box it up. I can carry it down to the shelter in Parsons. Your dad’s not getting a nickel back from me, because I already spent it on beef. But I’ll do anything else you say.”
“I want you to open the line at five thirty, like we planned.”
“You want to sit down and let me bring you a plate?”
“No,” I said. “I want a spoon.”
I couldn’t have told you why, exactly. I only knew I couldn’t sit up at that head table next to an empty chair with a bow on it and be stared at. If a hundred and forty people were going to look at me, and they were, then I wanted something in my hands. I wanted to hand each one of them a hot plate.
Connie looked at me a long second. Then she tied an apron around my waist, right over the wedding dress, and handed me the long serving spoon for the beef.
So that’s where I was at 5:30. Standing at the head of the buffet line in a white wedding dress and canvas sneakers, with beef juice up to my wrist.
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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