**Part 2**
I came around the steam table.
I want to tell you I planned it. I didn’t. I put down the plate and walked around the end, in my dress and my sneakers, and I stood in front of Derrick’s mother.
I didn’t hug her. It would’ve been too much. But I did something I think surprised both of us.
I took the ring off my finger. It came off easily, a little loose, as if it had known all along. I held it out in my open palm.
“Here,” I said. “It’s yours. It always was.”
She stared at it. She didn’t take it.
“Take it, Mrs. Pruitt.”
“I don’t…” Her voice cracked. “I don’t think I should.”
“Then keep it for Derrick. Give it to the next girl he loves. Make sure he loves her first.”
Her face crumpled. She took the ring in both hands, held it against her chest, and bowed her head. For a long moment, she just stood there, a woman in a navy dress, in the middle of a VFW hall, with a hundred and forty witnesses and a roast beef supper going cold.
“Sit down,” I said gently. “Please. I made you a plate.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“I can’t eat in front of…” She waved her hand at the room.
“Then we’ll go sit at the head table. With Daddy. And you can eat in front of just the three of us.”
She laughed. A broken, startled, wet little laugh. “Your father will throw me out.”
“My father’s a good deal softer than he looks.”
Across the room, Daddy was watching us with an expression I couldn’t read. Then he stood, straightened his new gray suit, and pulled out the chair beside his own.
They ate together, the three of us. Daddy, Gloria Pruitt, and me, at the head table, under the gold banner that said AMY JO & DERRICK.
At first nobody spoke. Gloria cut her roast beef into smaller and smaller pieces. Daddy ate steadily, the way he does when he’s thinking. I picked at my potatoes.
Finally Daddy put down his fork.
“Mrs. Pruitt.”
“Gloria.”
“Gloria.” He turned the name over like a tool. “I want to say something. And I want to say it plain.”
She nodded, braced.
“I came damn near to driving out to that lake and hauling your son back by his collar.” His voice was low and steady. “I’m glad I didn’t. Because I figured out, sitting in that church, that if I had, I’d have done the same thing you did. I’d have made the child pay for being afraid.”
Gloria’s eyes shone.
“But I’ll tell you what I think,” Daddy said. “I think a man who can’t walk down an aisle is a man who needs to sit somewhere quiet a while and find out why. And I think that’s his business. And I think my daughter’s strong enough to wait and see what he finds out. Or not wait. That’s hers, too.”
He looked at me. I felt it all the way down.
“But the money. It’s not her debt. It’s not mine. It’s yours and your husband’s, for choosing to spend on your boy. And I’d be ashamed to take a penny back from it, and ashamed to let you take one from her.”
Gloria wiped her eyes with a napkin.
“I’ll tell you what you can do,” Daddy said. “You can eat that roast beef. You can stay for the cake. And you can dance with my mother-in-law, if you’ve a mind, because she’s been waiting eighty-four years.”
That broke it. Gloria laughed, and cried, and put her hand over her mouth.
“I don’t dance,” she said.
“Neither do I,” said Daddy. “But I’ve been practicing.”
The cake was a three-tier lemon with buttercream roses, made by Mrs. Ortega from the bakery on Main Street. She’d worked on it for two days. At eight o’clock, Daddy and I cut it together, with the big knife, in front of everyone, and nobody said a word about the missing groom.
I cut the first slice and put it on a plate and handed it to Gloria.
“For you,” I said. “For the road home.”
She took it in both hands. She looked at it for a long time.
“I never made a wedding cake for my own daughter,” she said, almost to herself. “I bought it from the grocery. I told myself it didn’t matter.”
“It matters.”
“Yes.” She looked up. “I think it does.”
Then she did something I’ll remember to my last day. She picked up the fork, took a bite of lemon cake and buttercream, closed her eyes, and said, quietly, “Oh. That’s lovely.”
“It is.”
“Tell Mrs. Ortega, I said so.”
“I will.”
Behind us, the band struck up a waltz.
Grandma June got her dance.
She took Harold Tibbs’s arm, ninety-one and eighty-four, and the two of them shuffled across the VFW floor like a pair of wind-up toys, in slow, magnificent, wobbling circles. The room parted around them. Someone began to clap in time. Someone else joined. By the second chorus, the whole hall was clapping, a hundred and forty people in their best clothes, stomping on the old linoleum.
Grandma threw back her head and laughed.
I stood at the edge of the dance floor in my white sneakers, with a plate of cake going soft in my hand, and watched my grandmother, who had never once had a wedding dance, dance.
Daddy came and stood beside me.
“Your mama would’ve loved this,” he said.
“She’d have been out there.”
“She’d have taken the band’s microphone.”
I laughed. It cracked in the middle. Daddy put his arm around my shoulders, and I leaned into the good gray wool of his new suit.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he said.
“For what?”
“That you didn’t get the one you wanted.”
I thought about it. I thought about Derrick, sitting by the water with his engine off. I thought about the six words he’d sent to his brother. I can’t. Tell her I’m sorry.
“I got something,” I said. “I don’t know what yet. But I got something.”
Derrick called me a week later.
I was in my classroom, after the children had gone, cleaning the whiteboard. My phone buzzed on the desk. His name.
I let it ring three times. Then I answered.
“Amy Jo.”
“Hello, Derrick.”
A long, ragged breath on the line. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Then maybe start with where you’ve been.”
He told me. He’d driven to his cousin’s cabin in the mountains and stayed there six days. No phone. No people. Just himself and a wood stove. He’d cried the first night. By the third, he’d started to understand.
“My whole life,” he said, “I’ve been what people needed me to be. My mother needed a son who’d do well. You needed a husband. Everybody needed something, and I kept saying yes, because I couldn’t stand to see anybody’s face when I said no.” His voice shook. “And the day came, and I was standing in that church parking lot in a tuxedo, and I realized I didn’t know if I wanted to marry you or if I’d just never learned how to refuse.”
“That’s honest.”
“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever said.”
“It’s not,” I said. “The worst thing you ever did was let your brother tell me.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so, I’m sorry, Amy Jo.”
“I know you are.”
“I don’t expect…”
“Good. Don’t.”
“I’m not asking for anything.”
“I know.” I set down the eraser. “Derrick, I’m going to say something, and I’d like you to hear it all the way through.”
“Okay.”
“I loved you. I want you to know that. It wasn’t pretend. But I’m glad you didn’t walk down that aisle if you weren’t sure. Because I’d rather have a bad day than a bad marriage. I’d rather stand in a VFW in sneakers than in a kitchen in twenty years, wondering why my husband never looks at me.”
He was crying. I could hear it.
“But I’m also angry,” I said. “And I’m going to stay angry for a while. And I think that’s fair.”
“It’s more than fair.”
“I’ll mail the ring to your mother. She’s already got it. She came by the house on Sunday with a pound cake and a check for the whole nine thousand, and I turned it down.”
“She did?”
“She said she wanted to give it to me anyway. I said no. We ended up splitting a piece of the cake and not mentioning the money.”
A long pause. Then, in a very small voice: “She called me last night. She said she was ashamed. I’ve never heard her say that before.”
“Neither had I.”
“She said she was going to do better.”
“I think she means it.”
“Do you think I can?”
I looked out the window at the parking lot. A mockingbird sat on the flagpole, singing to nobody.
“I don’t know, Derrick,” I said. “That’s yours to find out. But I hope you do.”
