Love me some thunder but not when it threatens to crack open the delicate shell of my wedding day to Tootie Miller. Tootie, all swag-haired and sparkletooth and me, my belly full of Tootie’s kid, five months round by now.
When Tootie proposed after six years of on and off and other women and then floating back to me, it was not much of a thing. It was raining also, hard and full, deep dips of puddle and we were coming out of Pitt’s Diner when all of a sudden he kneels down on the knee of his brown cords. I figured he was only proposing because Tootie’s father didn’t want me running off into the night with his grandson. I never did get that sonogram. I just told Tootie I did, because if it turned out a girl, well who knows?
We set up the backyard, white metal folding chairs. “Four’s all we need,” Mama says. “No one cares much for your fiancé.” And she’s right. Tootie is some kind of rat poison now, and that’s been ever since his father sold the tire factory and fired half of River Street. The factory was all those people knew and now where would everyone go?
Mama grubs up a handful of daisies. “Hold this,” she says, “it’s your bouquet.” It’s a scrawny bunch of wilty, weedy things, petals missing, stems broken over. “I’d be surprised,” she sniffs, “if that fiancé of yours even shows up. Coming and going all those years like he has.”
She must see a thunder crossing my face just then because she strokes my hair and says she’s sorry and smoothes the lace on my wedding dress. “You’re a good girl,” she says. She rubs my stomach. “Maybe we will get that little girl I have been praying for.”
I call Tootie, try to get here before the rain, I tell him. He sounds sleepy and I swear I can hear Loretta Swan breathing up the air beside him. I’ll get there soon as I can, he says and that’s when I feel a drop of rain on the top of my head. Mama starts to fold up the chairs and tells me to get inside. This will all have to wait, she tells me. I follow her inside, chuck the broken daisies in the trash, the rain whooshing down behind me.
