Chapter 8 - The Toast That Wasn’t
The master of ceremonies was Dave McCracken.
Dave was fifty-two, had three fingers missing from his left hand from an encounter with an industrial planer in 1994, and had been my partner in the flooring business for seven years. He was wearing a brown suit that smelled powerfully of cedar balls, and his gray beard was trimmed to the skin of his jaw.
He tapped the microphone with his blunt thumb. The feedback hummed through the speakers, silencing the sixty people seated at the long oak tables.
“Folks,” Dave said, his voice echoing off the exposed chestnut rafters of the mill porch. “We’ve had the ham, we’ve had the cider, and some of you from Gastonia have had entirely too much of Arthur Vance’s apple brandy.”
A ripple of laughter went through the tables. Arthur raised his glass from the head bench with a broad, silent grin.
“Now,” Dave continued, leaning his hip against the speaker stand. “I’m not a man for long speeches. When Lyra first came to work for me, she was twenty-three years old and had a notebook full of engineering diagrams she’d drawn at night school. She looked at a floor we’d just laid in the Hendersonville library—three thousand square feet of quarter-sawn white oak—and she told me the expansion gap along the north wall was three-sixteenths of an inch too narrow for the humidity in July.”
I looked down at my plate, feeling the heat rise in my neck. Callum laughed, his arm resting over the back of my chair, his fingers lightly brushing the heavy faille at my shoulder.
“I told her she was crazy,” Dave said, grinning into the crowd. “I told her that floor had been laid by men who’d been swinging mallets since she was in diapers. And then July came, the rains hit the French Broad, and that north wall buckled four inches off the joists.”
He paused, letting the silence settle over the porch.
“Lyra didn't say I told you so,” Dave said, his voice dropping into that quiet, gruff sincerity that mountain men use when they’re about to say something they’ll be embarrassed about tomorrow. “She showed up at five in the morning with a circular saw, four jacks, and three cases of cold tea. We had that floor flat by noon before the county inspector could pull our bond. That’s the kind of woman she is. She doesn't make a fuss about the weather; she builds for the flood. And Callum... well, Callum had the sense to see that, which is more than I can say for some of the fellows who’ve been hanging around the office trying to buy her coffee for the last five years.”
He raised his tumbler of water. “To Callum and Lyra. May your foundations be square, your timbers seasoned, and your roof tight against the winter.”
The room rose, glasses held high. “To Callum and Lyra!”
As the guests sat back down, Mom stood up from her chair at the center table.
She had her napkin in her left hand, her chin lifted with that determined, theatrical authority she used when taking over the Christmas program at the Baptist church.
She took three steps toward the microphone, her hand already reaching out for the stand.
“Dave,” she said with a bright, tight smile that didn't reach her eyes. “If I could just have a moment... as the mother of the bride, there are a few things that need to be said about the journey that brought us here today.”
Dave did not hand her the microphone.
He didn't even look at her hand. He stepped smoothly between her and the wire, took the microphone from the clip, switched off the battery pack on the base with his thumb, and handed the entire unit to the sound technician sitting behind the mixer board.
“That’s the end of the speeches, Mrs. Bennett,” Dave said pleasantly, his voice loud enough to carry to the first three rows of tables. “Callum’s orders. We’ve got forty-five minutes of daylight left, and the fiddler’s been sitting on his stool since four o'clock waiting to play the reel.”
Mom’s hand remained suspended in the air for two seconds, six inches from Dave’s brown lapel.
Her face went through that horrifying transformation—from public graciousness to private, venomous shock—that I had seen a thousand times in our kitchen in Gastonia when a neighbor had the temerity to decline an invitation to an Amway demonstration.
“Dave,” she whispered, her voice trembling with rage. “This is my daughter’s wedding.”
“I know whose wedding it is, Ruth,” Dave said, leaning down slightly so only she and the head table could hear. “And I know who paid the invoice for the sound system. It wasn't you, and it wasn't that girl in the cream shift who’s been scowling into her cabbage salad for two hours. Sit down and eat your peach, Ruth. You’re making the guests nervous.”
Mom stood there for the space of five heartbeats.
She looked at Callum. Callum was looking at his cider glass.
She looked at Arthur Vance. Arthur was engaged in a very serious conversation with Aunt Patricia about the price of phosphate fertilizer.
She looked at Dad.
Dad was cutting a piece of ham with his pocketknife, his thumb pressing the blade through the rind with steady, methodical precision. He did not look up.
Mom turned on her heel, her lavender organza frills shaking with the violence of her retreat, and marched back to her seat.
She did not sit down. She picked up her beige linen jacket from the back of the chair, grabbed Ren by the wrist with a force that made the younger girl drop her fork into her plate with a sharp *clatter*, and dragged her toward the parking meadow.
The screen door of the porch slammed behind them with a flat, wooden crack that sounded like a branch snapping in the frost.
Nobody stopped them.
Nobody turned around.
The fiddler struck the opening notes of *Soldier’s Joy*—the strings bright, fast, and wild—and Arthur Vance stood up from his chair, reached across the table, and took his wife by the hand.
May you like
“Right, Nadine,” Arthur said, his voice booming over the music. “Let’s see if your knees still work after thirty years of church committees.”
***
