She Called the Bride the Help, So I Read the Bill Aloud novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Three Hours

In her grandmother's kitchen the bassist returns her phone, and the groom at the gate asks what invoice, because he heard every number and none of it meant anything to him.

I walked the six blocks to my grandmother's house in a wedding dress, and nobody on Orleans Street asked me one question.

That is how I knew how bad I looked.

My grandmother was shelling field peas on her porch with a bowl in her lap.

Odile Ferrand is seventy-eight years old, and she has cooked in half the dining rooms in Natchez.

She put the bowl down and looked at the dress, and the train dragging behind me, and the grass stains on my knees.

"Mamère," I said. "I left Anson."

"Three hours," she said. "That's a record in this family."

Then she opened her arms, and I walked into them and cried into her hairnet.

By seven o'clock I was sitting at her kitchen table with my shoes off and the zipper of the dress pulled halfway down.

She set a bowl of red beans in front of me and told me to eat before I said another word.

My phone was somewhere in a van at Bellwood, so I had no idea who was calling me.

Somebody knocked on the screen door.

My grandmother went to answer it with a dish towel over her shoulder.

"Well," she said. "Look at this."

A man stood on the porch holding my phone in one hand and my gray catering folder in the other.

It was the bass player.

He had taken off his jacket and rolled his sleeves to the elbow.

A long scar ran across the back of his left wrist.

"I'm Reuben Falk," he said. "I'm sorry to come to your door."

He held out the phone. "I found these on the cake table. Your phone has been ringing for an hour."

"Come in out of the heat," my grandmother said.

He looked at me through the screen, and I saw him decide not to.

"I don't want to crowd her, ma'am."

"You're not crowding anybody. You're standing in my flies. Come in."

He came in.

He had to duck a little under the kitchen doorway, and he took his boots off at the mat without being told.

My grandmother put a bowl in front of him too.

He sat across from me, and for a minute nobody talked.

I had seen him before today. I was sure of it now.

Two years ago at the Natchez jazz festival, I had carried a tray of oysters past the riverfront stage.

The bass player in the back had looked up and watched me all the way to the tent.

That was the whole memory.

He had looked, and I had kept walking, and he had never come over.

"You played at the river stage," I said. "In the fall."

His spoon stopped.

"I did."

"Okay," I said, and I did not say anything else about it.

"Your phone," he said, and slid it over.

It lit up in my hand. Fourteen missed calls from Anson and nine from a number I did not know.

I turned the phone face down on the table.

"I don't have the words for what I just did to your wedding," Reuben said.

"I don't either."

"For what it's worth," he said, "it was the best thing I ever heard anybody do with a microphone."

My grandmother snorted into her red beans.

I laughed, and it came out wet, and I pressed the back of my wrist against my mouth.

Reuben looked down at his bowl, giving me a moment, which I noticed.

Headlights swung across the kitchen wall.

A car door shut hard in the street.

I knew the walk before I saw the man.

Anson came up the path in his tuxedo with his bow tie hanging loose and a rose still pinned to his lapel.

He stopped at the gate and put both hands on the top of it.

"Joelle," he called. "Come out. Please."

I went to the porch with my grandmother and Reuben behind me.

Anson looked the way he always looked when he thought he was in trouble, young and sorry and a little bit sulky.

"Babe, you can't do that in front of everybody."

"I did it," I said.

"Mama is beside herself, Joelle. She'll forget it by tomorrow if you come back tonight and say you were upset."

"Upset about what?" I said.

He didn't answer, so I said it for him.

"The invoice, Anson. Forty-one thousand dollars. You heard it. You stood there."

His forehead creased.

"What invoice?"

I stared at him.

"The one I read out loud. At the microphone. In front of you."

"I thought that was a speech," he said. "I thought you were upset. Mama said you were tired."

It was not a lie. I could see that it was not.

He had stood six feet from me and heard every number, and none of them had meant anything to him.

Something in me went quiet then, and stayed that way.

"Go home, Anson," I said.

"Joelle, please. Tell her you're sorry and we can go to the beach."

"Go home."

I stepped back inside and shut the screen door and then the wooden one behind it.

I leaned on it with my eyes closed.

Through the wood I heard Anson saying my name again.

Then I heard my grandmother's voice, flat and polite, telling him the porch light was off for the night.

When I opened my eyes, Reuben was out on the porch, not in the house.

He had pulled his boots back on, and Anson was still at the gate.

I opened the door a crack.

"You can go home too," I said.

"I know," Reuben said. He sat down on the top step with his back to me and his boots on the walk, facing the gate.

"I'm not leaving until he does."

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