I could. But I knew they wouldn’t want me to.

“She’ll have to come to the rehearsal, right?”

My mother and my sister looked anxiously at each other.

“We think she will,” Varena said. “But Dill can’t seem to tell me what that woman will do.”

Dill (Dillard) Kingery’s mother was still in Dill’s hometown, which I thought was Pine Bluff.

“How long have you been dating Dill?” I asked.

“Seven years,” Varena said, smiling brightly. This, too, was obviously a question that had been asked many times since Varena and Dill had announced their engagement.

“Dill is older than you?”

“Yeah, he’s even older than you,” my sister said.

Some things never change.

We heard my father’s yell from the front door. “One a you come help me with this damn thing?” he bellowed.

I got there first.

My father, who is stocky and short and bald as an eight ball, had hauled the long table out of the bed of his pickup to the front door and definitely needed help getting it up the steps.

“Hey, pigeon,” he said, his smile radiant.

I figured that would fade soon enough, so I hugged him while I could. Then I lifted the front of the table, which he’d propped against the iron railing that bordered the steps up to the front door.

“You sure that’s not too heavy for you?” Dad fussed. He had always had the delusion that the attack I’d endured somehow had made me weak internally, that I was now frail in some invisible manner. The fact that I could bench-press 120 pounds, sometimes more, had no influence on this delusion.

“I’m fine,” I said.

He picked up the rear of the table, which was the kind with metal legs that fold underneath for easy carrying. With a little maneuvering, we got it up the steps and into the living room. While I held the table on its side, he pulled out the metal legs and locked them into place. We swung the table upright. The whole time he worried out loud about me doing too much, straining myself.