The Supper at the VFW
I put two slices of roast beef on the plate, a scoop of mashed potatoes, a spoonful of green beans with the little bits of bacon Daddy had insisted on. I laid a dinner roll on the edge and slid the plate across the steam pan.
“Sit down, Mrs. Pruitt,” I said. “You’ve had a long drive.”
Her hand stayed out, palm up, waiting for the ring. The plate sat in front of her instead.
“I didn’t come to eat.”
“I know. But it’s a hundred and forty plates, and I’d hate for one to go cold.”
Somewhere behind me, a spoon clinked against a pan. Nobody else made a sound. The VFW hall smelled like gravy and floor wax and the old flags hanging by the door, and in the corner the band, four men in matching vests, sat very still behind their instruments, like boys who had walked into the wrong classroom.
Mrs. Pruitt looked at the plate. Then she looked at me, and I saw something I hadn’t expected. She was not angry. She was braced. She had come in here prepared for a scene, and I had handed her potatoes.
“The ring was my mother’s,” she said, lower now.
“I know it was.”
“It’s been in my family four generations.”
“Then it ought to go back to your family.” I wiped my hand on the dish towel tucked into my sash. “But not across a steam pan, in front of everybody. I’ll bring it to your house tomorrow in a box, with a note. You have my word.”
“Your word.”
“It’s about all I’ve got left that I haven’t spent,” I said, “and I’ve never broken it yet.”
I should tell you who I am, since that morning I was only a bride and by evening I was something else.
My name is Amy Jo Calloway. I’m thirty-one years old, and I teach fourth grade at the elementary school in Harlan Creek, a town with one stoplight and two Baptist churches. My mother, Loretta, died of ovarian cancer four years ago, in the same church where I was supposed to marry. Daddy, Raymond, drove a feed truck for thirty-three years. He has hands like catcher’s mitts and a laugh he saves for special occasions. After Mama passed, he stopped buying anything for himself. He wore the same funeral suit to every wedding, every Easter, every Sunday, until it shone at the elbows.
The morning of my wedding, he walked out of the church bathroom in a new one. Charcoal gray. He’d driven forty minutes to Knoxville to buy it. He looked like he was wearing somebody else’s life, and he was so proud of it I couldn’t breathe.
I met Derrick Pruitt at a fundraiser two years ago. He sold insurance, wore nice shoes, and had a way of asking you a question and then actually listening. He cried at my mother’s grave the first time I took him there. I remember thinking: A man who cries at a stranger’s grave is a man you can build a house with.
Mrs. Pruitt, Gloria, never liked me much, but she was careful about it. She kept the criticisms in her pocket like loose change. “Amy Jo’s a sweet girl, but she’s a little plain, isn’t she?” “Teachers don’t make much, do they?” She talked about the cost of the wedding as if she were reading a ledger aloud. The rehearsal supper at a nice steakhouse. The honeymoon cruise, a surprise gift from her side. Her family, she liked to say, was “investing.”
I let it go. Daddy didn’t, quite. He’d narrow his eyes and say nothing, which is the loudest thing he knows how to do.
So there I stood at 3:41 that afternoon in the bride’s room, in my mother’s veil, holding a church offering envelope with pencil on the back.
Rehearsal supper 2,100. Honeymoon cruise 6,900. Total 9,000.
Derrick’s sister Tammy had said it all to the carpet. She was twenty-six and sweet as a peach, and she looked like she wanted the floor to open and take her. “I’m so sorry, Amy Jo. Mom made me come.”
“It’s all right, honey.”
“It’s not.”
“No,” I said. “But it isn’t yours to carry.”
I called Derrick eleven times, voicemail every one. I want you to know I did not scream at the phone. I said, on the third call, “Derrick, please. Just tell me you’re alive.” On the seventh I said, “Whatever it is, we can talk about it.” On the eleventh, I didn’t say anything. I listened to his voice saying You’ve reached Derrick Pruitt, leave a message, all warm and easy, a voice that had no idea.
His brother Wade found him by the lake, sitting in his truck. No scratch on him. No accident. Just a man with the engine off, staring at the water.
“He says he can’t,” Wade told Daddy, with his hat in his hands. “He says he doesn’t know why. He says he’s sorry.”
“To who?” Daddy asked.
Wade looked at the floor. “To me. He said tell her he’s sorry. He didn’t say it to her.”
Daddy didn’t answer. But I watched something go across his face that I’ll carry the rest of my life.
Out in the sanctuary, a hundred and forty people sat in their good clothes. I peeked through the door crack. The organist, Miss Elva, was on her third trip through the same four hymns, and her shoulders had begun to sag. Little kids had started sliding off pews. Somebody’s baby fussed. Pastor Dale stood at the front with his Bible closed over one finger, looking like a man waiting on a bus that wasn’t coming.
Daddy slipped into the bride’s room. He shut the door softly.
“I can be in that truck in two minutes,” he said. “I know where he is.”
“Daddy.”
“I’ll bring him back by the collar if I have to.”
“Daddy.” I put my hand on his sleeve, on the new gray wool. “If you have to go and fetch a man to marry me, I don’t want him.”
He stood there. Big hands hanging. A muscle in his jaw going.
Then he took the envelope out of my fingers, read the back, and folded it once, twice, and slid it into his coat pocket, the way you pocket a thing you plan to deal with later.
“Raymond.”
Grandma June had been sitting in the corner on a folding chair the whole time, with her cane across her knees and her good church hat pinned on at an angle. She’s eighty-four. She raised six children, buried a husband, and has never once, to my knowledge, been surprised.
“What’s in the warmers at the hall?”
“Roast beef,” Daddy said, slowly. “A hundred and forty plates.”
“And the band?”
“Setting up already.”
“Paid?”
“Sixty-four hundred. Tuesday.”
Grandma lifted her cane and pointed it at me like a baton.
“Then there is a hot supper four blocks from here and a church full of hungry people.”
I’ll tell you what I thought, standing there in my mother’s veil.
I thought about sending a sentence out to that truck by the lake. I had several. They were sharp and well-made, and I’d have been justified in every one.
But a sentence doesn’t feed anybody.
“It’s yours,” Daddy said, reading my face. “I bought it for you. Not for him. The roast, the band, the cake. Every dollar. It’s yours to do with what you please.”
He’d worked six months of overtime for that dinner. I knew it. He’d taken the early route, the one that leaves at 3 a.m., so he could afford the band. Mama would’ve wanted a band. She’d been a dancer, once, before she was a mother, and she used to waltz me around the kitchen on Saturday mornings with a dish towel over her shoulder.
I bent down and took off my satin heels.
I pulled the white sneakers out of my tote bag, the ones I’d bought at Walmart for the reception dance, and sat on the edge of the bride’s-room couch and tied them with fingers that didn’t shake.
“Don’t you send that band home,” Grandma said sharply.
“No ma’am.”
“I’m eighty-four, and I’ve never once had a wedding dance.”
She said it flat, like a weather report. And that was the closest I came to crying all day.
Daddy made the announcement himself.
He walked to the front of the sanctuary in his new gray suit and stood beside Pastor Dale. A hundred and forty heads turned. The organist, mercifully, stopped mid-hymn.
“Folks,” he said. His voice cracked on the first word, and he cleared his throat and tried again. “There’s no wedding this afternoon.”
A murmur rolled through the pews. Somebody gasped. Somebody said, “Oh, Lord.”
“There’s a supper at the VFW, four blocks over. It’s roast beef. My daughter would like you to come eat it.”
Nobody moved.
I stepped out from behind the pulpit curtain in my wedding dress and my white sneakers. “Both sides of the aisle,” I said. “Everybody’s welcome. Every last one of you.”
The silence stretched.
Then old Harold Tibbs stood up from the fourth row. He’s ninety-one, a Korean War veteran with a hearing aid and a brown suit he’d been married in sixty-eight years ago. He leaned on the pew in front of him.
“I never turned down a roast beef in my life,” he said.
And just like that, the room exhaled.
By 5:30, I was standing at the head of the buffet line in the VFW hall.
Wedding dress. Sneakers. A serving spoon.
The room looked beautiful, honestly. My cousins had strung white lights across the ceiling. The tables wore blue tablecloths, with mason-jar centerpieces of wildflowers that Aunt Dolores had cut that morning from her own yard. There was a banner over the stage that said AMY JO & DERRICK in gold letters, and nobody had taken it down, and I decided nobody would.
Harold was first. He stood at the front of the line with his plate held out in both hands, in his old brown suit, looking solemn as a man at an altar.
“Roast beef or ham, Mr. Tibbs?”
“Roast beef, sweetheart. Always.”
I gave him three slices. He didn’t say a word about the wedding. He just looked at me with his wet, ancient eyes, and nodded once, the way a soldier nods at another soldier, and moved down the line.
Derrick’s Aunt Pearl was next. She’s a heavyset woman with a big laugh, and she’d been crying all afternoon. She took my free hand and pressed it against her cheek.
“Honey, I’m so sorry. He doesn’t deserve you.”
“Eat, Aunt Pearl.”
“I’ll take extra gravy.”
“You’ve earned it.”
She laughed, damply, and shuffled on.
The line went on. Cousins and neighbors, church ladies in their good hats, the Kowalski twins who’d played the flute at my graduation. The kids from my fourth-grade class, who’d come in their Sunday best with their parents, and who looked at me with wide, solemn eyes, and one little boy named Eli said, “Miss Calloway, are you still pretty even though it didn’t happen?”
“I’m still me, Eli,” I said. “Want a roll?”
“Yes, please.”
The band started up. Soft at first, a slow country waltz. Grandma June, on the arm of my uncle, was already making her way to the dance floor.
And that’s when the door beside the flags opened.
I knew who it was before I looked.
You can feel certain people walk into a room. It’s like a change in air pressure.
Gloria Pruitt came in wearing a navy dress and sensible heels, with her purse hooked over one arm and her car keys in her fist. She walked along the side wall, past the whole line, deliberately, one slow step at a time. Table by table, the conversation stopped. Forks hung in the air. The band faltered, then recovered.
She stopped on the other side of the steam pan.
“I’ll take the ring now, Amy Jo.”
She’d said it softly, but the room was so quiet it carried to the rafters.
That’s where we began, you and I. With a plate of roast beef on a steam table and a woman holding out her hand.
“I’d as soon not make a second trip,” she added.
The ring was on my left hand. It was her mother’s, a small old-fashioned diamond in a worn gold setting, a little chipped at one corner. I had loved it, honestly. I’d loved that it wasn’t new.
My left hand was wrapped around a serving spoon.
A hundred and forty people watched to see who I was going to be.
I felt Daddy start to rise from the head table, the scrape of a chair, the weight of him gathering. I turned my head and shook it, very slightly. Don’t. He sat back down, slowly, but I could feel him vibrating from thirty feet away like a power line.
I put down the plate I’d made and picked up a clean one.
Then I said the sentence I’d found, somewhere between the church and the hall. It was not one of the sharp ones.
“Mrs. Pruitt, I’m going to give you the ring. I want you to know that. It’s yours, and it was never mine to keep.”
Her mouth opened slightly. She’d braced for a fight.
“But it’s been a hard day for everybody. Your boy’s hurt. My boy’s, well, I’d say Derrick’s hurt, too. He didn’t sit in a truck by a lake for three hours because he was feeling cheerful.”
A flicker passed over her face.
“I’d rather not take this ring off in the middle of a supper,” I said. “I’d rather do it the right way. Tomorrow. At your kitchen table. With coffee.”
“And the money?”
There it was. She said it quietly, and I’ll give her credit, she didn’t enjoy saying it. But she said it.
“Nine thousand dollars,” she said. “My husband and I put that aside. We can’t just…”
“I know you can’t.”
I reached into the pocket of my wedding dress. I’d put the offering envelope there an hour ago, after Daddy handed it back. I took it out and unfolded it.
“The rehearsal supper was twenty-one hundred. Your family paid it. I wasn’t asked, but I attended. I ate the steak. I’ll cover it.”
“Amy Jo…”
“The cruise,” I said. “Sixty-nine hundred. I never agreed to go, and I won’t pretend I’d have gone alone. But I understand a cruise is a hard thing to refund.” I looked at her. “Is it refundable?”
She blinked. “I, we haven’t, I don’t know. We never asked.”
“Then you should ask. Most lines give most of it back, if you call before departure. And if they don’t, I’ll make up the difference, over time, at whatever pace a schoolteacher can manage.”
The hall had gone so quiet I could hear the ice settling in the tea urn.
Gloria Pruitt stared at me.
“You’d pay it,” she said. “After what he did.”
“What he did is between him and me. And you.” I looked down at the envelope. “What you paid for was paid on good faith. I’d rather owe an honest debt than keep money I didn’t earn.”
Her hand, the one that had been held out for the ring, began, very slightly, to shake.
I don’t know what I expected.
Maybe a harsh word. Maybe a slap, or a sneer, or a retreat. People do all sorts of things when they’ve been caught being smaller than they meant to be.
What Gloria Pruitt did was set her purse down on the end of the buffet table, hard, as if it had gotten heavy. She pressed her fingers to her mouth. And she said, in a voice I’d never heard from her:
“I told him not to. I told him all week.”
I waited.
“I told him he was making a mistake.” She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at the floor, at the old linoleum with its scuffs and its memories. “He said he was nervous. I said every man’s nervous. He said it was more than that. And I said, well, you’d better get over it, we’ve spent nine thousand dollars.”
“Mrs. Pruitt.”
“Nine thousand dollars, Amy Jo. I said it to my own son. In the kitchen. The night before his wedding. I said, you owe us.”
Her voice broke.
“And he drove to a lake and turned off the engine, because that’s what you do when you’ve been taught love is a debt.”
Nobody moved. The band had gone still. At the back of the hall, a baby hiccuped.
“I came here to take a ring back from a girl in a wedding dress,” Gloria said, and a tear slipped down her cheek, and she didn’t wipe it. “I’ve never been so ashamed in my life.”
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.”
It’s been a year.
I never did marry Derrick. He moved to Chattanooga, took a job at a nonprofit, and started seeing a counselor. We exchange a card at Christmas. He sent me a short letter in March that said, I think I’m finally learning to say no without feeling like I’m drowning. I wrote back: Good. Keep going.
I’m not bitter. I want to be clear about that. I was, for a few months, and I let myself be. I cried in the grocery store. I threw a casserole dish at a wall, once, in the privacy of my own kitchen, and felt wonderful. But somewhere around the fourth month, the anger softened into something quieter. A kind of gratitude, almost.
Because here’s what that day taught me: I’d been a person who solved other people’s disappointments. Who smoothed things over. Who gave extra gravy to anyone who looked sad. And standing at the head of that buffet line in my wedding dress, I finally understood that generosity isn’t weakness, but only when you give it freely and not out of fear.
I gave that roast beef supper because I wanted to. Not because I owed it. Not because I was afraid. Because a hundred and forty people had shown up, and love deserves a meal.
Gloria Pruitt and I have lunch on the first Saturday of every month. Her husband, Walt, joined us once. He’s a gruff, taciturn man who said four words the whole time. On the way out, he took my hand and said, “I’m sorry for all of it,” and I said, “Thank you,” and we left it there.
Tammy comes to my classroom every few weeks to read to the kids. They adore her.
And Daddy.
Daddy wore the new gray suit to church the Sunday after, and the one after that. He’s worn it every Sunday since. Last week, I found him in the garage, polishing his shoes, humming something off-key.
“Daddy.”
“Hm?”
“You’re happy.”
He considered that, turning a shoe in the light.
“I think I am,” he said, slowly, surprised. “I think I forgot how.”
“What changed?”
“Your mama died, and I figured the best part of my life was done. Then my girl stood in front of a hundred and forty people in her sneakers, and handed a stranger a plate.” He shook his head. “I thought, well. If she can do that, I can buy a suit.”
I laughed. He grinned.
“I’m proud of you,” he said. “Every day. But especially that one.”
I put my arms around his big shoulders. He smelled like shoe polish and Old Spice. He held me the way he has since I was small, one enormous, careful hand on the back of my head.
Last month, on a Saturday evening, the VFW held its annual harvest dinner. I went with Daddy and Grandma June, who’s eighty-five now and refuses to use a walker.
The band was there. The same four men in matching vests. As we came in, the bandleader, a stout, bearded man named Cal, caught my eye from the stage and tipped his hat.
Halfway through the night, he leaned into the microphone.
“We’d like to dedicate this next song,” he said, “to a young lady who once fed a hundred and forty people in her wedding dress.”
The hall applauded. Somebody whistled. Harold Tibbs, ninety-two and still sharp, banged his cane on the floor.
I turned scarlet.
“Amy Jo,” Cal said. “Would you do us the honor?”
I looked at Daddy. He was grinning like a boy. Grandma June shoved me forward with her cane.
I walked to the middle of the floor. The band started a waltz. And Daddy, big, awkward, in his gray suit, offered his arm, and I took it.
We danced.
Not well. Daddy has two left feet and a sense of rhythm best described as theoretical. But we went around the floor, slowly, in the soft white light, with a hundred people clapping us on, and I was wearing the white sneakers, because I’d decided long ago they were my lucky shoes.
Halfway through the second verse, Daddy leaned down and murmured in my ear.
“Your mama’s watching.”
“I know.”
“She’s laughing at my feet.”
“She’s laughing at both of us.”
I closed my eyes. The music swelled. And I thought about all the things I’d been told a wedding was. A beginning, a promise, a ring on a hand.
It’s none of those, I think. Or not only.
It’s a table, set for people you love. It’s a hot meal on a day that fell apart. It’s a woman in sneakers with a serving spoon, choosing, in front of everyone, who she’s going to be.
The song ended. Daddy dipped me, badly, and nearly dropped me, and the hall roared.
When I stood, laughing, wiping my eyes, I found Grandma June waiting at the edge of the floor, leaning on her cane, with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen on her face.
“Well,” she said. “That’s two dances I’ve watched, and I’ve only had the one.”
“Grandma, you’ve had the one. You can have another.”
“At my age?”
“At any age.”
She narrowed her eyes. Then she handed me her cane.
“Hold this,” she said, and she went out onto the floor on Harold Tibbs’s arm, one more time, and the band, bless them, struck up another waltz.
