My Best Friend Took My Wedding, So I Fed the Whole Town novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Sawhorses

At midnight on the dock Lasse brings tables from the smokehouse and wraps her burned hand, and by dawn the church phone tree is calling everyone.

By midnight I was on the harbor dock with a phone in one hand and a mooring line in the other.

The caterer had agreed to everything in one call.

"Two hundred plates, Saturday, five o'clock, on the dock?" she said. "Honey, it's your food. I'll have it at the boat ramp by four."

The tables were the problem.

The town kept its folding tables in the church basement.

I had no key to the church basement, and no wish to ask for one.

So I had hooked a line to the old handcart from the harbor office.

I was hauling the six picnic tables from the bait shed along the planks on the handcart, one at a time.

The third table jammed on a board.

I wrapped the line around my hand and leaned back and pulled.

The board gave.

So did the skin on my palm.

"Ah, hell," I said, and dropped the rope.

"Don't pull that again," a voice said from the dark.

Lasse Koskela walked out of the end of the dock with a sawhorse on each shoulder.

He was still in the flannel shirt from the Lodge.

I had not heard his truck.

"Fjeld," he said, and set the sawhorses down.

"Koskela," I said.

"Show me your hand."

"It's fine," I said.

"It's bleeding on the dock."

He took my wrist in his fingers, and turned my palm up under the harbor light.

The rope had taken a strip of skin from the base of my thumb to my pinky.

He did not say anything about it.

He poured water from a bottle over my hand.

Then he pulled a clean dish towel from his back pocket and wrapped it twice around, snug and flat.

His hands were big and rough and warm, and very careful.

I stood there and let him do it, which surprised me.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"I heard you tell a hundred and forty people to come eat on my dock."

"It's the town's dock," I said.

"It's the town's dock with my smokehouse on it. And I've got forty folding tables and a flatbed truck."

He tied off the towel.

"Nobody should be hauling picnic tables by herself at midnight," he said.

"I didn't ask you for help."

"I know. I'm not doing this to be thanked, so don't."

He said it flat and picked up his sawhorses.

I should have told him to go home.

I thought of the keys instead.

The day we buried my father, Torvald Lindholm had walked up to Lasse in the church parking lot.

He had held out his hand.

Lasse had put my father's shop keys into it.

He had not come to the lunch afterwards.

I had counted the people who did not come, and he was on the list.

"You gave him the keys," I said.

Lasse stopped with a sawhorse in each hand.

He did not turn around.

"I did," he said.

"I'm not asking you to say anything about it. I'm only saying I remember it."

"All right," he said.

"And I'm going to let you carry the tables anyway."

He looked at me over his shoulder, and for the first time all night something in his face loosened.

"That's a fair trade," he said.

It took us until three in the morning.

He drove the flatbed back and forth between the smokehouse and the dock.

I set the tables end to end down the whole length of the pier.

Forty-six places, then sixty, then eighty.

When we were done he stood at the far end and looked back down the row.

"You really think they'll come?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I've known them my whole life, and I don't know."

He nodded.

Then he went home.

I walked up Pine Street with my hand wrapped in his dish towel and slept in my father's chair with my boots on.

At six a phone call woke me.

It was the lodge owner.

"Sunny, I'm sorry to ring so early," she said. "But Birgit Lindholm was out here at dawn with a list."

"What list?"

"The whole church roll. She's been calling every family in the parish since five o'clock."

She paused.

"She's telling them the dinner's cancelled, and that you're keeping the Lindholm family's wedding money."

I looked at the towel on my hand.

"How many families?" I said.

"All of them, honey," the lodge owner said. "Every single one."

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