The bill for my wedding came to $31,400, and my father wanted me to see the check before I saw the dress.
He mailed me a photocopy of it in July. One check, made out to the Grand Island chapel and the hall next door. The chapel was $2,400, and the hall and dinner for 90 came to $29,000. Underneath, in his slanty banker’s hand, he’d written: As discussed.
What we’d discussed was Horace.
I was 8 when Horace became my mother’s husband. My father, Rafael, left when I was three and mailed child support until I turned 18. Fifteen years of envelopes. He has counted them ever since like they were years of bedtime stories.
With fourteen months to go until the wedding, a surgeon opened my chest and performed a triple bypass. For twelve weeks, Horace took me to cardiac rehab every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning. Thirty-six sessions. Forty minutes each way. He brought a thermos and the crossword and never missed one. My father sent a card with a lighthouse on it.
Then my father called, offered to pay every dime, and added, “But Horace doesn’t set foot in that church.”
I called him back twice. The second time he hung up on me. Horace, on a walker after his right hip was replaced on September 3, ate his soup and said, “Get married, Opal. That’s all I want.”
On Saturday, October 17, Horace stood just inside the open back doors of the chapel with both hands on that walker, not one inch past the threshold. My father squeezed my elbow and told me eyes front. I married Scott. When I turned around, the doorway was empty.
At the reception I found Horace in the garden, brought him inside, took the DJ’s microphone, and gave the father-daughter dance to the man who drove me to all 36 sessions. I held out my hand.
My father stood up at the head table.
“Sit down, Opal,” he said. “I PAID FOR THIS ROOM.”
Ninety-one
The DJ, a kid with a ponytail, took one step back from me like I might bite.
I didn’t sit down.
I have sat down for my father my whole life. At graduations he flew in for. At my first wedding, which he also paid for, and which lasted about as long as the shrimp tower. I sat in a cardiac ward with tubes in my neck and read his lighthouse card and thought, well, at least it’s a nice lighthouse.
My legs were not doing any more of it.
“You paid for the room, Dad,” I said into the microphone. “You didn’t buy me with it.”
Ninety people heard that. Some of them were Scott’s cousins from Kearney who had met me twice. One of them put her wine glass down very slowly, the way you set down something you’d like to keep watching.
My father kept standing. His gray suit didn’t have a wrinkle in it. Mine did. I’d been sitting on the garden bench.
“We’ll talk about this later,” he said.
“We’re talking now.”
Then Horace moved.
He took his hands off the grips. He did it one hand at a time, like a man letting go of a ladder. He pushed the walker four inches to the side with his fingertips, and it rolled to the edge of the dance floor and stopped there by itself, crooked.
“Horace,” Mom said from her chair. “Your hip.”
“My hip is forty-four days old, Lizzie,” he said. “It can dance one song.”
He could not dance one song. We both knew it. He put his left hand on my shoulder and his right hand in mine, and I took most of his weight on my side, which is the side the surgeon cut through. It held. I’ve got a zipper scar from my collarbone down and three borrowed veins from my own leg, and every one of them held.
The DJ didn’t know what to play. He looked at me. I said, “Anything slow,” and he put on something by Patsy Cline, which was either an accident or the smartest thing a twenty-year-old has ever done.
We didn’t dance so much as sway in a circle the size of a bath mat.
Horace smelled like Old Spice and the mothballs from that brown suit. He was breathing hard by the second line.
“You’re holding me up,” he said.
“Thirty-six times you held me up. I’ve got thirty-five to go.”
He laughed, and it hurt him, and he laughed anyway.
My father was still standing. Nobody had told him he could sit, and he wasn’t going to ask.
Over Horace’s shoulder I saw my mother get up.
Mom is 84. She has one good knee and she has never, in my memory, made a scene, including the time a man backed into her Buick at the Hy-Vee and she just wrote down his plate number and thanked him. She walked to the head table. She didn’t go around it. She went right up to the white tablecloth across from my father.
“Tell her about the phone call, Rafael,” she said.
She didn’t use the microphone. She didn’t need it. The song had a quiet part.
My father said, “Elizabeth, sit down.”
“You don’t get to tell two women in one night to sit down.” She turned to me. “He called Horace in the rehab unit. September 5th. Two days after the surgery. Horace was still on the morphine button.”
Horace’s hand got tight in mine.
“Lizzie,” he said. “Don’t.”
“I was in the chair by the bed. I heard every word on speaker, because Horace can’t work that phone.” She looked back at my father. “Say what you said.”
My father didn’t.
So she said it for him.
“He said, ‘You can’t even walk. You’ve got no business at the front of a church.’ And then he said fifteen years of child support bought him the aisle.”
The song ended right there. I’d like to say the DJ planned that too.
Nobody clapped.
I looked at Horace. His face was gray and wet at the hairline, and he was looking at the floor the way he’d looked at the gravel outside.
“That’s the enough,” I said. “That’s what you meant.”
“I didn’t want you picking,” he said. “You’d have picked me. And then you’d have had no wedding.”
“I’d have had a wedding in Mom’s backyard with a sheet cake.”
“You’d have had a wedding where your father didn’t come.” He finally looked at me. “I’ve had you fifty-five years, Opal. I could spare him one afternoon.”
I couldn’t say anything to that. I just kept him up.
The Head Table
Scott got there first.
He came across the floor with his reading glasses still in his shirt pocket and pulled a chair off the nearest table, a gold folding chair with a little bow on the back, and set it behind Horace’s knees.
“Sir,” he said. “Sit before you fall on my wife.”
Horace sat. I stayed standing, with my hand on his shoulder, because I wasn’t sure I’d stay up either if I let go.
That left my father alone at the head table with ninety people looking at him and not one of them looking away.
He talked. Of course he talked. My father was a bank vice president for thirty years and he has never met a silence he couldn’t fill with a reason.
“I want everybody to understand something,” he said. He didn’t have the microphone, so he said it louder. “I have supported this girl since 1966. Every month. I never missed a payment either. Nobody brings that up. Nobody counts my envelopes.”
“You count them,” I said.
“Somebody has to.” He pointed at Horace with his whole hand. “He got the easy part. He got the bedtime and the Little League and the pancakes. I got a mailbox. And I paid for every one of those pancakes, Opal. Ask your mother who bought the groceries in that house.”
“I did,” Mom said. “With my job at the phone company. Your checks paid for her braces and her shoes. I kept the stubs.”
“Then you know.”
“I know you sent eighty-five dollars a month for fifteen years,” Mom said. “I know you sent a lighthouse when she nearly died.”
Somebody at table six actually said “oof.” I think it was Scott’s Aunt Jill.
My father put his napkin down on his plate. That’s the closest he comes to throwing something.
“I made one request,” he said. “One. For thirty-one thousand four hundred dollars. One afternoon walking my own daughter down an aisle without him standing behind me like a reminder. And he agreed. He agreed. He’s a grown man. Nobody twisted his arm.”
“You called a man on a morphine pump,” I said, “and told him he couldn’t walk.”
“He couldn’t.”
“He came anyway.”
My father opened his mouth and then shut it. I’ve seen that face twice before: once when my first husband told him the business loan wasn’t going to be paid back, and once when Mom told him in 1971 that she was getting remarried and he wouldn’t need to visit at Christmas anymore since he didn’t anyway.
Here is what I wanted to do. I wanted to walk up to that head table, pick up his plate of prime rib, and set it in his lap. Gently. I’m a heart patient, I do everything gently now.
Here is what I did.
I went over to the gift table, where Scott’s sister had stacked the cards in a white birdcage, and I found the one from my father. It was thick. I knew what it was, because he’d told me twice: a copy of the check, framed, so I’d have it “for the album.”
I walked it back across the dance floor and put it on the tablecloth in front of him.
“You can have the album copy,” I said. “Scott and I will pay you back. Every dime. It’ll take us a while, so I’ll mail it. Every month. You can count the envelopes.”
Scott, who is a retired high school shop teacher and has a pension and a paid-off Silverado and not a lot else, didn’t even blink.
“Every month,” he said. “I’ll lick the stamps.”
My father looked at the frame. Then he looked at the room. I think that was the first moment he understood that the room did not belong to him, that he’d paid for the chairs and the chicken and the Patsy Cline, and every single person in it was looking at him like a stranger who’d wandered in from another party.
He reached for the one thing left.
“Opal,” he said, quieter now. “I’m eighty-five. How many more of these do you think I get?”
That was the play. Pity. I’d seen him use it on my grandmother.
“You got this one,” I said. “You had it. You had the aisle. Nobody took that from you. You just couldn’t stand him being in the same building while you had it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Horace stood at the back door of that church on a forty-four-day-old hip so you could have it. He never sat down. Did you look at him, Dad? When you were walking me? Did you turn around once?”
He didn’t answer.
“He did,” I said. “He watched the whole thing. Then he went and stood in a parking lot so you wouldn’t see him.”
My father picked up his suit jacket from the back of his chair. He folded it over his arm. He left the framed check on the table.
“Enjoy your party,” he said.
He walked the long way around the dance floor so he wouldn’t have to pass Horace’s chair. That took him past the cake table, and the cake was still standing there, four tiers, uncut, with the little sugar flowers my mother made herself over three nights.
He didn’t look at it.
The side door shut behind him. That was the door I’d watched all night. It went right on opening and shutting after that, for the bathroom and the smokers, and my stomach didn’t go up once.
The Gold Chair
The DJ, God bless him, asked if I wanted the microphone back.
I said, “No, honey. You keep it. Play something fast so people get up.”
He played “Shout,” and Scott’s cousins from Kearney got up, and so did Aunt Jill, who should not have, and by the second chorus there were forty people on that floor bending their knees and coming back up, and the noise filled in where my father had been.
I sat down next to Horace on a second gold chair. Mom pulled up a third. The three of us sat at the edge of the dance floor like people waiting for a bus, watching everybody else shout.
“You’ll have to pay him thirty-one thousand dollars,” Mom said.
“Thirty-one thousand four hundred.”
“You know the four hundred.”
“I know all of it. He made sure.”
Horace was still catching his breath. His tie was crooked. He’d tied it himself, with a new hip, and I could tell, because the narrow end hung longer than the wide end. I fixed it. He let me.
“I’ve got the money in a coffee can,” he said.
“You do not.”
“Not all of it.” He thought. “About nine hundred.”
“Horace, I’m not taking your coffee can.”
“I drove you thirty-six times,” he said. “That’s about two thousand miles in the Ford. At the government rate, that’s…” He frowned. “I don’t know what that is. Your mother does the math.”
“You’re not charging me mileage on my own heart,” I said.
He laughed so hard he had to hold his side, and Mom smacked his arm, and I laughed too, and then I was crying, which I had been trying not to do since about 2:15 that afternoon. I had good mascara on. It turned out not to be that good.
Mom handed me a napkin from her purse. She always has one. She has had a napkin in her purse since 1963.
“He had that call on speaker for six minutes,” she said quietly. “Horace sat there and said, ‘Yes, Rafael. All right, Rafael.’ When it was done, he asked me to promise I’d never tell you.”
“And you promised.”
“I promised I’d never tell you. I didn’t say anything about telling a room.”
Scott came off the floor red in the face and leaned down to us.
“The photographer wants to know when we’re cutting the cake,” he said. “He’s got a dinner somewhere else at nine.”
The photographer was a Mr. Strickland, whom we’d hired off a list at the chapel. He’d been very polite all day and said “lovely” a lot and called my mother “the matriarch,” which she enjoyed. He had a big camera on a strap and a smaller one on his belt and the face of a man who has seen a hundred weddings fall apart and this was not in his top ten.
“Now,” I said. “We cut it now.”
We cut it. Scott held the knife and I held his hand, and I fed him a bite and he fed me one, and he got frosting on my chin and wiped it with his thumb. Then I cut the second slice myself, a big one, the corner piece with two sugar roses on it, and I carried it over to the gold chair and handed it to Horace on a paper plate.
“First slice after the bride and groom goes to the father of the bride,” I said.
He held that plate in both hands. He didn’t eat it right away.
“Your mother made these roses,” he said.
“I know.”
“Took her three nights.” He picked one off and ate it. “Tastes like three nights.”
Strickland came over later, while the band of cousins was trying to do the electric slide and getting it wrong, and showed me the back screen of his camera. He said he’d send me everything, but he wanted me to see one now.
It was the walker.
Just the walker, standing by itself at the edge of the dance floor, a little crooked where Horace had pushed it, the tennis balls on its back feet. Behind it, out of focus, two people were holding on to each other in the middle of the floor. You couldn’t tell which one was holding up which.
“Lovely,” Strickland said. “Best one of the day. I don’t usually say that.”
“Can you print it big?”
“How big?”
“Big enough for a man with bad eyes to see from his recliner.”
He wrote something on his hand with a pen.
At ten o’clock the hall started emptying out. People came by our three gold chairs to say goodnight, and every one of them, I mean every one, shook Horace’s hand on the way. Some of them had known him forty years. Some of them had met him that night. Aunt Jill kissed him on the top of his head and left lipstick there and nobody told him.
Scott brought the Ford around to the door, because Horace wasn’t going to make it to the far end of the lot and he wasn’t going to let anyone push him in a wheelchair either.
I walked Horace out. He had both hands back on the grips. It took us a long time to cross that hall, again, the other direction. The walker squeaked on the parquet the whole way.
At the door he stopped. Out past the hall, the gravel path went off to the garden and the gate where he’d come in.
“Opal,” he said. “Your father.”
“I know.”
“He’ll be sorry in a year or so. He takes a while.”
“Then he can tell me in a year or so.”
He nodded. He didn’t argue. Then he looked down at his feet, and at the threshold, a little brass strip on the floor of the doorway, and he stepped over it on his own, the new hip first, careful.
“There,” he said. “Now I’ve been in.”
I took his elbow, and we went out together onto the gravel.
Family loyalty can sting in unexpected ways – these stories of a mother’s painfully lopsided gift, a family cruise berth given away, and an ex bringing a night aide to a pool party explore the hurt that can come from those closest to us.
