Part 3: The Waltz
Grandma June was getting up. She didn’t ask anybody for help. She pushed her chair back, squared her shoulders, and came around the end of the head table one slow step at a time in her lavender dress with the pearl buttons.
She stopped in front of me. And she held out her hand, palm up. The way a boy would have done in 1958.
“I believe this is mine,” she said.
I took her hand.
We walked out onto that floor together. Eighty-four and thirty-one. A cane and a pair of canvas sneakers. She hung the cane over her wrist and put her other hand on my shoulder.
She couldn’t really waltz anymore. We swayed. That was all. She smelled like Jergens lotion and the peppermints she keeps in her pocketbook.
“I’m sorry it’s just me, Grandma,” I said.
“Hush. I’ve waited sixty years for this, and I’m not going to have it apologized over.”
“I mean for you. I’m sorry your dance had to be this one.”
She leaned back so she could see my face. Her eyes were wet. Her voice wasn’t.
“Amy Jo, you listen to me. I buried a husband. And a daughter-in-law. And a baby boy you never knew about, who’d have been your uncle. I know what a bad day is.”
She squeezed my shoulder.
“A bad day is one where there’s nobody to feed and nobody to dance with. Look around this room, sugar. This is not a bad day. This is a hard day. They are not the same thing. When you’re my age, you’ll know the difference by the sound.”
That’s when I finally cried.
Right there in the middle of the dance floor, with my forehead down on my grandmother’s shoulder, and her patting my back in time to the steel guitar.
I heard a chair scrape. Then another one.
When I got my head back up, Daddy was standing at the edge of the floor with his hand held out to his sister Deb. Harold Dawson had gotten hold of one of the auxiliary ladies. Derrick’s Aunt Judy and her husband were out there. Emma was dancing all by herself, turning in circles, throwing the last of her petals straight up in the air so they came down on her own head.
By the end of that song, there wasn’t room on the floor to swing your arm.
When it ended, Daddy cut in.
He’s no dancer either. He stepped on my sneaker twice and said “sorry” both times. And at the end of the song, he held on a few seconds longer than the music did.
“Your mother,” he said. Then he had to stop and start over. “Your mother would’ve done exactly what you did today. Spoon and all.”
Aunt Deb’s cake was three tiers. White frosting, with real mums tucked around the bottom. Before anybody could see, she had already slipped the little bride and groom off the top and hidden them in her purse. I will love her for that as long as I live.
I cut the cake myself, the way you’d cut any cake. Connie’s girls started plating it up.
I took the first piece up to the head table.
Lorna sat there alone. Everybody else was out on the dance floor or standing in the cake line. She had both her hands flat on the tablecloth on either side of her plate. And she was crying the way a careful woman cries. No sound. Not wiping at it. Just letting it run down and drip off her chin onto that navy jacket.
I set the cake down in front of her, and I sat in Daddy’s chair.
The band was playing something fast now. Harold Dawson was out there doing something with his elbows.
“He didn’t tell me either,” Lorna said.
“I figured.”
“I pressed his shirt this morning. I stood in my kitchen at seven o’clock and pressed his shirt and hung it on the door. And he drank his coffee and watched me do it.”
She pulled in a breath.
“He kissed me on the head when he left. He said, see you at the church, Mom.”
I hadn’t known that part. I felt it land somewhere under my ribs.
“I sat in that front pew for forty minutes with everybody I know staring at the back of my head,” Lorna said. “And when Jeff showed me that phone, I thought I would die of it. I couldn’t go to you. I couldn’t look at you. So I went out and sat in the car. And I got out a pencil.”
She turned to me. Her whole face was coming apart.
“That’s what I do, Amy Jo. Twenty-six years at that lumberyard. When something’s gone wrong, I add it up, because a column of numbers will at least hold still. I added up the only part I knew how to add. And then I sent my daughter in with it. To a girl in her wedding dress.”
She pressed her lips together until they went white.
“I have been ashamed of my son for three hours. I am going to be ashamed of myself a good deal longer than that.”
I could have let her sit in it.
There was a part of me that wanted to. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say, well, you should be, and leave her alone with her cake.
But I kept thinking about that shirt hanging on the door.
He’d done it to her too. He let his own mother iron for him, and drive to the church, and sit down in the front pew in a dress she’d bought for the day. Then he let her find out from a telephone. In front of her sister and her preacher and everybody she’d ever known.
At least I’d had my father and my grandmother in the room with me.
She’d had a parked car.
“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.
Epilogue: I Believe This Is Mine
I won’t tell you it was all fine after that.
I slept at Daddy’s house for two weeks. I cried in the stockroom at the pharmacy more than once, standing between the shelves of cough syrup with my hand over my mouth so the customers wouldn’t hear.
Derrick came back to town before Thanksgiving.
He asked, through Jeff, if he could come by and tell me he was sorry. I said he could say it to my father first.
He did. On Daddy’s front porch. Standing up. From what I’m told, it took about four minutes, and Daddy mostly just listened.
Then he said it to me, in the church parking lot after a Wednesday night supper. He stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets, and he couldn’t quite look at me.
I told him I hoped he’d learn to say hard things sooner. That was all I had for him. I got in my car and drove home.
After that, a money order started showing up in Daddy’s mailbox on the first of every month. Two hundred dollars. No note. Nobody had asked for it.
I’ve always believed that was Lorna’s doing. She never said so, and I never asked.
Daddy signed every single one of them over to the auxiliary’s funeral dinner fund. It took thirty-two months for it to come to sixty-four hundred dollars. There have been a good many families in this county who sat down to ham and scalloped potatoes after a burying without ever knowing where the money came from.
Lorna brought Aunt Deb’s cake stand back the Wednesday after the wedding. Washed. With a jar of her bread and butter pickles sitting on top of it.
She and I aren’t family. We were never going to be. But she sits two pews ahead of me at church. And every Sunday, during the greeting, she turns around and takes my hand.
I still have the sneakers.
There’s a stain on the left toe, the color of beef juice, that never did come out. I’ve quit trying.
Grandma June turned eighty-five that March. We held her party at the VFW hall. I hired the same band from Parsons. The man with the white beard saw me come in, nodded once, and knew exactly what to play first without my having to ask.
The first notes of the old waltz started up.
Grandma pushed her chair back from the table. She squared her shoulders. She hung her cane over her wrist, and she held out her hand to me, palm up.
“I believe this is mine,” she said.
It was.
Note: This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. All images are for illustration purposes only.
