I served the food onto the plate myself: two slices of roast beef, mashed potatoes, green beans, and a dinner roll. Then I removed the ring from my finger and set it next to the gravy. “Here’s your ring, Mrs. Pruett,” I told her. “Dinner is included, and we’ll be cutting the cake at eight. I hope you’ll stay.”
She looked down at the plate, her keys shaking in her hand. Everyone stood frozen. Just then, the side door swung open, and Wesley walked in wearing his wrinkled tuxedo shirt, with mud covering his shoes and his eyes looking red. He turned toward his mother. “Mama, don’t ask her for anything else. She doesn’t owe us a single dime.”
Standing in front of all 175 guests, Wesley finally admitted the truth. There had never been a honeymoon cruise. His mother had given him $9,000 to reserve it, but he had lost every dollar gambling on online ball games. He had kept the truth hidden for months, and when his mother asked to see the tickets that morning, he completely panicked.
Mrs. Pruett lowered herself into a folding chair. She had sent her daughter to ask me for money to pay for her own son’s gambling debts. Taking the offering envelope from Daddy, she ripped it into pieces and quietly said, “Lacey Ann, I am so ashamed.”
Wesley said he was sorry to me and Daddy before leaving by himself. I handed Mrs. Pruett the ring regardless. It had once belonged to her mother, and I felt it should remain with her family. She stayed at the reception, took a cup of coffee from her sister-in-law, and ate every bit of her dinner.
At eight o’clock, she stood next to me while I cut the cake. As the band started playing, Elmer walked across the room in his brown wedding suit, bowed politely to Grandma Opal, and invited her to share the first wedding dance of her eighty-nine years.
After that, Daddy took my hand and danced with me, while my white sneakers squeaked against the VFW floor. Not a single guest went home before midnight. That winter, Wesley joined a recovery program and spent the next three years paying his mother back.
I never married Wesley. Every Christmas, his mother still sends me a card with love written inside. Two years later, I married a kind man who never fails to arrive early. Grandma Opal danced at that wedding as well.