A Plate for Darlene Pruitt
I set the clean plate down on the counter between us.
Then I dipped my spoon into the steam pan and laid two thick slices of roast beef across it, the good end pieces, the ones with the crust.
Mashed potatoes. A ladle of gravy. Green beans with bacon. A yeast roll from the basket Mrs. Odom from the Methodist church had baked that morning.
Darlene Pruitt watched me do every bit of it.
Her mouth was set in a thin line. Her knuckles had gone white around her car keys.
I slid the plate across the steam table toward her.
“You’ve driven back and forth all afternoon, Miss Darlene,” I said. “Sit down and eat something.”
She stared at the plate as if I’d handed her a live snake.
“I didn’t come here to eat.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“I came for my mother’s ring.”
“And you’ll have it,” I said. “After supper. It’s been on my hand all day. It can stay on another hour.”
Behind her, somebody let out a breath. I didn’t look to see who.
Darlene’s chin lifted.
“You think this is funny? Making a show of yourself in front of the whole county?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t think one thing about today is funny.”
My voice shook on the last word. I swallowed and steadied it.
“But there’s a hundred and forty plates in that kitchen, and my daddy paid for every one of them. Your sister ate. Your cousins ate. Pastor Ellis is on his second roll. I’m not going to let you be the only one in this room who goes home hungry.”
The VFW hall was so quiet I could hear the coffee urn ticking in the corner.
Darlene looked down at the plate.
Then over at the long tables, where her own family sat scattered among mine, forks in midair, watching.
Then back at me.
“And I’d like you to stay for cake,” I said.
“Cake,” she repeated.
“Four tiers. Lemon with buttercream. Mrs. Haskell stayed up until two in the morning on the roses.” I tried to smile. “Seems a shame for nobody to cut it.”
For a long, terrible moment, I thought she’d turn on her heel and walk right back out the door by the flags.
Then Derrick’s aunt Peggy stood up from the third table.
“Darlene,” she said quietly. “Sit down, honey. Sit with me.”
Darlene’s eyes flickered toward her sister.
Her shoulders, which had been held up around her ears since she walked in, came down about an inch.
She picked up the plate.
She didn’t say thank you. She didn’t look at me. She carried it over to Peggy’s table and sat down stiffly in a metal folding chair, her purse still hanging off her arm, and stared at the roast beef as though she had no idea what to do with it.
Peggy put a napkin in her lap for her.
The room began to breathe again. Somebody laughed nervously. The clink of forks started up, slow at first, then steady.
I turned back to the line.
Mr. and Mrs. Kowalski from my father’s work. The Garcia twins. Old Mrs. Templeton, who’d taught me to read in first grade and who squeezed my wrist with her soft, spotted hand and whispered, “Good girl.”
I served every single one of them.
When the line finally ended, my arms ached and the hem of my dress was spotted with gravy. Grandma June waved me over to the head table, where Daddy had saved me a plate.
I sat down beside him and looked at it and realized I couldn’t eat a bite.
“You don’t have to,” Daddy said quietly.
“I know.”
He reached under the table and found my hand. The one without the ring.
“Your mama,” he started, and then stopped, because his voice gave out.
He tried again.
“Your mama would’ve handed her that plate, too.”
I put my head on his shoulder in my wedding dress and stayed there a while.
Across the room, Darlene Pruitt had picked up her fork.
She was eating.
Slowly. Like it was hard to swallow.
But she was eating.
And then I noticed Grandma June leaning toward me with a look I’d known my whole life. The look she got right before she said something nobody else would.
“Amy Jo,” she said, “have you looked at that envelope?”
“The one with the nine thousand dollars?”
“That one.” Grandma tapped her cane against the floor. “Raymond. Give it here.”
Daddy pulled the folded church envelope from his coat pocket and handed it over.
Grandma squinted at it through her bifocals. Then she held it up so I could see.
Honeymoon cruise 6,900.
“Who booked that cruise?” she asked.
“Derrick did,” I said. “Through Lorraine’s travel agency. He wanted it to be a surprise. All I knew was Caribbean, seven nights.”
Grandma nodded slowly. Then she turned in her chair and raised her voice just enough to carry two tables over.
“Lorraine Bishop. Come here a minute.”
What Lorraine Knew
Lorraine Bishop had been my mother’s best friend since the third grade.
She’d run the only travel agency in town out of a storefront on Main Street for thirty years, with brochures for Branson and the Smoky Mountains taped up in the window. She’d also been at my bridal shower, at my baptism, and in the hospital waiting room the night my mother passed.
She came over to the head table with her napkin still tucked into her collar.
“Yes, Miss June?”
“You booked a honeymoon cruise for these two?”
Lorraine’s face changed.
It was small. A flicker. But I saw it, and so did Grandma.
“I did,” Lorraine said carefully. “Back in March.”
“Sixty-nine hundred dollars?”
Lorraine looked at me. Then at the envelope in Grandma’s hand. Then over her shoulder at the table where Darlene Pruitt sat with Peggy.
“Lorraine,” Daddy said quietly. “What is it?”
She pulled out the empty chair beside me and sat down heavily.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” she whispered. “Not today. I figured it wasn’t my business, and you’d find out soon enough, and I didn’t want to be the one.”
“Find out what?” I said.
Lorraine took a breath.
“Derrick cancelled that cruise ten days ago.”
I didn’t understand at first.
The words were English, but they wouldn’t line up into anything that made sense.
“Cancelled?”
“He came into the office on a Wednesday. Said there’d been a change of plans and he’d rather have the money back. There was a penalty, but it was early enough to get most of it.” She twisted her napkin in her lap. “I asked if you knew, honey. He said yes. He said you’d both decided to save it for a house.”
“We never decided that,” I said.
“I know that now.”
“Where did the refund go?”
Lorraine looked miserable.
“Back on the card it was charged to. Derrick’s card.” She hesitated. “But the deposit, the first three thousand, Darlene paid that. She came in with a cashier’s check. She was so proud. Said it was her wedding present to the two of you.”
The room seemed to tilt.
Ten days ago.
Ten days ago, Derrick had kissed me goodbye on my porch after the florist appointment and told me he couldn’t wait to see me walk down that aisle.
Ten days ago, he’d sat across from me at the Sonic and argued for twenty minutes about whether the groomsmen should wear vests.
Ten days ago, he’d already known.
“He planned it,” I said. My voice sounded very far away. “He didn’t get cold feet in a truck by the lake. He planned this.”
Daddy’s jaw was tight enough to crack a walnut.
Grandma June didn’t say anything. She just folded the envelope in half and laid it flat on the tablecloth with her hand over it.
I looked across the room at Darlene.
She was still eating. Small bites. Peggy was talking to her quietly, rubbing circles on her back.
She didn’t know.
I could see it plain as day. She had walked into this hall believing her son had panicked at the last minute and her family was out nine thousand dollars, a cruise she’d helped pay for and a rehearsal supper she’d hosted. She had come to collect what she was owed.
And the whole time, her son had the cruise money in his pocket.
“Amy Jo,” Lorraine said softly, “I’m so sorry. I should have called you.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. And I meant it.
I stood up.
“Where are you going?” Daddy asked.
“To tell her.”
“Baby, you don’t owe that woman a single…”
“I know I don’t,” I said. “But somebody ought to tell her the truth before she finds out the way I did.”
I walked across the VFW hall in my gravy-spotted wedding dress and my dancing sneakers. The band had started setting up a second time on the little stage, the drummer tapping his cymbals, and a few people at the tables were starting to talk normally again.
They went quiet when they saw where I was heading.
Darlene looked up as I stopped beside her table.
“I’ll give it to you now,” she said stiffly, setting her fork down. “If you’ve changed your mind. I’m about finished.”
“It’s not the ring, Miss Darlene.”
I pulled out the chair across from her and sat down.
“Did you know Derrick cancelled the honeymoon cruise?”
Her face went perfectly blank.
“What did you say?”
“Ten days ago. He went to Lorraine’s office and got the money back. Most of it. Including the deposit you paid.”
Darlene stared at me.
Then she turned slowly in her chair and looked across the room at Lorraine, who nodded once, sadly.
Peggy put her hand over her mouth.
“No,” Darlene said. “No. He wouldn’t. He told me last Sunday at dinner he’d packed his swimming trunks. He showed me the brochure.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re lying.” But there was no force behind it. Her voice wobbled like an old fence post. “You’re angry and you want to hurt me, and you’re…”
“Darlene.” Peggy’s voice was very gentle. “Lorraine doesn’t lie. You know that. Lorraine has never told a lie in her life.”
Darlene’s hands began to shake.
She picked up the church envelope, which I’d brought with me, and stared at her own penciled numbers on the back.
Honeymoon cruise 6,900.
“I wrote this,” she whispered. “I sat at my kitchen table at noon and wrote this up and sent Kayla over to the church with it. I was so angry at you. I thought you must have done something to drive him off. I thought…”
She stopped.
“He let me,” she said, almost to herself. “He let me come here and ask you for money he already had.”
Before I could answer, the double doors at the back of the hall banged open.
Every head in the room turned.
Derrick’s younger brother, Wade, stood in the doorway, still in his groomsman’s suit with the tie pulled loose. He was out of breath, like he’d run from the parking lot.
His eyes found his mother. Then me.
“Mama,” he said. “He’s here. Derrick’s out in the lot.”
The Truck in the Parking Lot
Nobody moved.
The drummer stopped mid-tap. A little girl at table six dropped her fork, and the clatter seemed to go on forever.
I felt my heart start pounding, and I hated it. I hated that some foolish part of me, even now, even knowing what I knew, wanted to run to that door.
Daddy was already on his feet.
“Sit down, Raymond,” Grandma June said, without looking at him.
“Mama, I am not going to let that boy…”
“You’ll sit down,” Grandma said, “because this is your daughter’s party, and it’s her business. Not yours.”
Daddy sat down. Slowly. Like it cost him something.
I looked at Darlene. Her face had gone gray.
“Did you tell him to come?” I asked her.
“No.” She shook her head. “No, I haven’t spoken to him since this morning. I didn’t even know where he was until Wade found him.”
Wade came across the room and crouched beside his mother’s chair.
“He saw your car in the lot,” Wade said quietly. “He’s been sitting out there twenty minutes. I went out to tell him to go home, and he said he needed to talk to Amy Jo.” He glanced up at me apologetically. “I told him you were busy. He said it’s important.”
“Important,” I repeated.
“That’s what he said.”
I stood up.
“Amy Jo.” Peggy reached for my arm. “You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
But I wanted to see his face.
I wanted to look at the man who had stood beside me in Pastor Ellis’s office three weeks ago, promising to love and cherish me, while he already had a refund slip in his wallet.
I walked to the back doors in my wedding dress. I could feel a hundred and forty pairs of eyes on my back the whole way.
Daddy followed at a distance. So did Wade. So did Grandma June, slowly, on her cane.
The evening air outside was warm and sticky and smelled like cut grass and the honeysuckle on the VFW fence. The sun was going down orange over the water tower.
Derrick’s blue pickup was parked at the far end of the gravel lot, under the security light.
He was leaning against the driver’s door with his arms crossed.
He still had on the white shirt from his tux, untucked now, and his hair was a mess, like he’d been running his hands through it for hours.
When he saw me coming across the lot, he straightened up.
“Amy Jo.”
I stopped about ten feet from him.
“You came,” I said. “That’s something. A few hours late, but something.”
“I’m sorry.” He took a step toward me. “God, I’m so sorry. I’ve been sitting by the lake all day trying to figure out how to say it.”
“You managed six words to your brother this afternoon.”
He winced.
“I know. I was a coward. I’m not proud of it.”
“Did you cancel the cruise?”
He froze.
It was only for a second. But it was enough.
“Who told you that?”
“Did you cancel it, Derrick?”
He looked at the ground.
“Yes.”
“Ten days ago.”
“Yes.”
“And took your mother’s money with it.”
“I was going to pay her back,” he said quickly. “I was going to explain everything. I just needed…”
“Needed what?”
He didn’t answer.
Behind me, I heard gravel crunch. Darlene had come out the doors after all. She was standing with Peggy on the VFW steps, one hand pressed against her chest.
“Derrick,” she called, her voice thin and cracking. “Is it true?”
He looked past me at his mother.
Something passed over his face. Guilt, maybe. Or fear.
“Mama, go back inside. This is between me and Amy Jo.”
“Is it true?” she said again. Louder. “Did you take my money?”
He didn’t answer her.
Instead, he turned and looked toward the passenger side of his truck.
Then the passenger door opened.
And a young woman stepped out onto the gravel.
She was maybe twenty-five. Blond, with her hair in a ponytail. She wore jeans and a pale pink blouse, and she had her arms wrapped around herself like she was cold, even in the June heat.
I had never seen her before in my life.
Derrick swallowed hard.
“Amy Jo,” he said, “this is Brittany.”
Behind me, Darlene made a sound I’ll never forget. Like the air going out of something.
The young woman wouldn’t meet my eyes.
Derrick took a breath.
“I didn’t come here to make excuses,” he said. “I came because I thought you deserved to hear it from me.” His voice dropped. “Brittany and I have been seeing each other since Christmas. And I used the cruise money to put a deposit on an apartment in Tulsa.”
He paused.
“We’re leaving tonight.”
And then Brittany finally looked up at me.
Her eyes were full of tears.
And she said, “There’s something else he hasn’t told you.”
Stay for Cake
Derrick turned and stared at her.
“Britt. Don’t.”
But she was already talking. Fast, like she’d been holding it in for a long time.
“He told me you’d broken it off,” she said to me. “Back in January. He said you’d called off the wedding and he was just helping your family settle up the bills. I didn’t know there was going to be a wedding today. I didn’t know until an hour ago, when his brother called his phone and I heard everything.”
She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“I’m not a homewrecker,” she said, her voice cracking. “I’m a dental hygienist from Broken Arrow. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have come out here if I’d known. I made him drive me here so I could see for myself whether he was lying.”
She looked at Derrick.
“And he was.”
The parking lot was dead silent.
Derrick opened his mouth.
Brittany held up her hand.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say another word to me.”
She reached into the cab of the truck, pulled out a small overnight bag, and set it on the gravel. Then she took her phone out of her back pocket.
“I’ll call my sister,” she said quietly. “She can come get me.”
She walked away from him across the lot toward the honeysuckle fence and stood there alone with her back to all of us, her shoulders shaking.
I stood there looking at Derrick for a long time.
I had pictured this man at the end of an aisle. I had pictured him holding our children. I had pictured him growing old on a porch beside me, the way Daddy had pictured it with Mama.
Now I looked at him under the buzzing security light, with his untucked shirt and his empty hands, and I felt something I didn’t expect.
I felt sorry for him.
“Go home, Derrick,” I said.
“Amy Jo…”
“Just go home.”
Darlene came down the steps.
She walked across the gravel in her navy dress and stopped in front of her son. She was a small woman, and she had to look up at him.
“Thirty-one years ago,” she said, very quietly, “your daddy walked out on me two weeks after our wedding. You were inside me. I never told you that, because I didn’t want you to grow up thinking you were the reason he left.”
Derrick stared at her.
“I raised you by myself in a trailer on Route 9,” Darlene said. “I cleaned motel rooms. I swore on my mother’s grave I would raise a son who’d never do to a woman what your daddy did to me.” Her voice broke. “And today you did worse. You didn’t just leave her. You left her in front of everyone, and you lied to me, and you let me walk in there and humiliate myself over money you stole.”
“Mama, please…”
“Go,” she said. “I can’t look at you.”
Derrick looked at her for a long moment.
Then he got into his truck and drove away, the tailgate rattling over the potholes, until his taillights turned the corner by the water tower and disappeared.
Darlene stood very still in the empty spot where his truck had been.
Then she turned around and looked at me.
“Amy Jo,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, “I owe you an apology I don’t know how to make.”
I looked down at my left hand.
At her mother’s ring, a small, old-fashioned gold band with a tiny diamond in a raised setting. Derrick had slipped it on my finger on a picnic blanket by the lake.
I twisted it off.
It came hard over my knuckle. I had to work at it.
Then I took Darlene’s hand, turned it palm up, and set the ring in it.
“It was your mother’s,” I said. “It ought to be with somebody who loved her.”
Darlene closed her fingers around it.
Then she did something I didn’t expect.
She slid it onto her own ring finger, where there hadn’t been a ring for thirty-one years.
“She’d have liked you,” she said, with tears running down her face. “She’d have liked you better than him.”
Daddy stepped forward then.
He reached into his coat pocket and took out a check, already written.
“I was going to give you this at the door,” he said to Darlene. “Nine thousand dollars. I didn’t want my daughter owing anybody anything.” He hesitated. Then he slowly tore it in half. “I reckon you don’t need it now.”
Darlene let out a laugh that was half a sob.
“No,” she said. “No, Raymond, I reckon I don’t.”
Grandma June thumped her cane on the gravel.
“Well,” she said, “the band’s paid for and the cake’s not going to cut itself. Everybody back inside.”
And somehow, we all went.
Brittany’s sister came and got her. Before she left, she walked over and hugged me, quick and awkward, and whispered, “I hope you find somebody who deserves you.” I hope she does too.
Back inside the VFW, Mrs. Haskell rolled out the four-tier lemon cake with the buttercream roses.
There was no groom to stand beside me. So I cut the first slice myself, in my wedding dress and my sneakers, and the whole room clapped like I’d done something brave.
I gave the first piece to Darlene Pruitt.
She was still sitting with Aunt Peggy, her mother’s ring on her finger.
“You stayed,” I said, setting the plate in front of her.
“You asked me to,” she said.
Then the band started playing.
The first song was slow and old, something from before I was born.
Grandma June struggled up from her chair, leaning hard on her cane, and looked around the room with her chin in the air.
“Well?” she said. “I’m eighty-four years old. Who’s going to dance with me?”
Old Harold put down his coffee cup.
He stood up in the brown suit he’d been married in fifty-eight years ago, walked across the floor, and held out his hand.
“Miss June,” he said, “I’d be honored.”
They danced slowly in the middle of the floor while everybody watched and a lot of people cried. Grandma’s cane was hooked over Harold’s elbow, and she was laughing like a girl.
When that song ended, Daddy came over to me and held out his hand.
“I paid for a father-daughter dance,” he said. “I’d like to collect.”
I laughed and let him lead me out onto the floor.
He held me close, the way he used to when I was little and stood on his shoes in the kitchen while Mama played the radio.
“You did good today, baby,” he whispered. “You did real good.”
Halfway through the song, I looked over his shoulder and saw Darlene Pruitt alone at her table, turning her mother’s ring around and around on her finger.
I leaned back and looked up at Daddy.
“Go ask her,” I said.
He blinked at me. “Who?”
“You know who.”
He looked across the room at Darlene for a long time.
Then he gave me a crooked little smile that I hadn’t seen on his face since we lost Mama, and he walked over to her table and held out his hand.
She stared at it.
Then she took it.
I stood alone at the edge of the dance floor in my wedding dress and my white sneakers, watching my father dance with the mother of the man who’d left me at the altar, while my grandmother danced with Harold, and a hundred and forty people ate lemon cake and laughed and talked under the paper streamers.
It wasn’t the day I’d planned.
But nobody went home hungry.
And for the first time in her eighty-four years, Grandma June got her wedding dance.
