I Walked Into My Son's Father's Engagement Party With Our Four-Year-Old, and His Mother Wasn't Surprised novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Back Row
Carrie walks Eli into the Elks Lodge engagement party for his father, lays a signed return receipt on Joyce Irwin's plate, and Joyce is not surprised.
I held my son's hand in the doorway of the Elks Lodge and watched his father raise a glass to a woman who wasn't me.
The banner over the stage said KENT + BECCA in gold glitter letters.
A hundred and thirty people sat at round tables under it, eating ham and green beans off the Lodge's good plates.
I had paid fifty dollars for two tickets.
The engagement dinner was open to anyone in Warren County who wanted to cheer, and the Daily News had printed the address.
That was how I found out Kent Irwin was back in Bowling Green.
Eli tugged my hand. "Mama, why is everybody dressed up?"
"Because two people are getting married."
"Do we know them?"
"One of them."
Eli was four and three-quarters, and he asked questions three at a time.
"Is it a birthday? Is there cake? Why are you holding my hand so tight?"
I loosened my fingers.
A woman in a Ladies Auxiliary sash sat at the sign-in table with a cash box.
She looked up and smiled at me.
"You must be the Nash party," she said. "Joyce said you might come. She saved you a seat."
I had not told one living person I was coming.
I opened my mouth to ask who Joyce was talking about, but a spoon hit a glass at the front of the room.
The slideshow had started.
Kent stood at the head table with a microphone and a smile I used to know by heart.
He had put on weight in the shoulders.
He still stood with his weight on his left foot.
"Becca," he said, "you walked into my life when I'd quit expecting anything."
Everyone said aww.
The screen behind him lit up with baby pictures.
Becca at two in a tutu. Becca at ten on a pony. Then Kent at about four, squinting into the sun with a cowlick standing straight up.
"That's me," Eli said.
He said it out loud, in his regular voice, in a room that had just gone quiet for a song.
Three tables turned around.
"Not you, baby," I whispered. "That's a different little boy."
"But it's my hair," Eli said. "And that's the man on my fridge."
He pointed at the stage.
I keep one photo on our refrigerator, held up by a magnet shaped like a peach.
It shows a laughing twenty-seven-year-old on the Barren River with a sunburned nose.
I had told Eli that was his daddy, and that his daddy lived far away.
Eli looked up at me. "Is he not far away anymore?"
Kent's eyes found the doorway.
I watched him see me, and then I watched him see Eli.
He went white.
The microphone dipped in his hand and squealed, and a hundred and thirty people winced.
A girl in a cream dress beside him, with a diamond I could have read by, stopped smiling.
That was Becca Nolte, the Lodge donor's daughter.
She followed his stare to the child by my hip.
Nobody was clapping anymore.
I could have turned around right then.
I could have walked back to my Corolla, driven Eli through the McDonald's, and let that man have his party.
I had done five years of that kind of quiet.
I took the envelope out of my purse.
So I walked in.
Down the center aisle, past the folding chairs and the cake table and the deputy sheriff with his fork halfway to his mouth.
Eli trotted at my side in his church shoes.
"Mama, are we allowed?"
"We're guests," I said. "Somebody saved us a seat."
I stopped at the head table.
Kent's mouth was open. "Carrie?"
"Hi, Kent."
"Who is..." He looked down at Eli, at the cowlick, at his own chin on a four-year-old. "How old is he?"
"Four and three-quarters," Eli said. "I'm going to be five in October."
Somebody dropped a spoon.
"Five years ago I mailed you a letter," I said, loud enough for the back tables. "Certified, with a sonogram in it. Five weeks after you left for Nashville."
"I never got any letter."
"I know," I said. "I think I know why."
I turned to the woman at the end of the head table.
Kent's mother wore a powder-blue suit and a corsage the size of a cabbage.
She was sixty-three, with a helmet of silver curls and a Lodge Auxiliary pin, and she had cut her ham into eleven even squares.
She had not looked at Eli once.
I took the green return receipt out of the envelope.
It was soft at the corners from five years in a shoebox.
I laid it on her plate, right beside the ham.
The signature on the line read Joyce Irwin.
The date was March ninth.
Joyce looked at the card.
She looked at my son.
Then she put her fork down, folded her napkin once, and did not look surprised, and that is how I knew she was the woman who had sat in the back row of every one of Eli's T-ball games.
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