A Wedding Renewal in Sweetwater, Texas

Chapter 26

It was a little after nine o'clock p.m. when Wilson got home. Unlocking the door, he stepped into the foyer. The minute his feet hit the hardwood, he filled his lungs with a deep breath of cool, clean, home air. Exhaling, he could almost feel himself shrugging off the last vapors of bank air. 

The sound of china clanging caught his attention. He spotted Sylvia partially hidden behind the dining room table. She was sitting on the rug and pulling their good china out of the sideboard. 

Placing his computer bag on the ground, he walked over to her and kissed her. "Hey honey, what are you doing?" 

She looked up at him and smiled. "Inventory." 

He glanced at the stacks of gold-and-white serving pieces on the floor beside her. They'd used these at Easter, and he couldn't imagine why she needed to count them now. "Why?" 

Sylvia reached deeper into the sideboard and began pulling out white dishes edged with a floral design. They'd never used these plates, but he recognized them as ones they'd inherited from Sylvia's family. 

"We're going to need a lot of china for the anniversary party," Sylvia explained. "Here, honey, would you start stacking these on the dining room table? I need to know how many place settings we have." 

He set a stack of plates on the wood surface. "I don't think you're going to have enough of either pattern." 

"I know," Sylvia said, handing him more plates. "We're going to mix and match." 

He hesitated. "But honey," he said, "shouldn't all the plates be the same pattern?" 

Sylvia handed him yet another stack of heavy china. "They don't have to match, Wilson. It'll give our party more charm if we mix the patterns. Kelly has some lovely Ironstone—her parents did a lot of formal entertaining in Atlanta. She's going to show me how to pull everything together. You'll see once we get the right linens." 

Wilson shifted his weight. "That's nice, Sylvia, but I don't want this party to look like we've hit a tag sale and picked up a bunch of mismatched china pieces. Bankers like things that match." 

Sylvia stopped pulling things out of the sideboard and looked up at him. In her favorite denim shorts and T-shirt from a vacation in Corpus Christi, she looked exactly like the girl he'd married ten years ago. Only that girl had looked a lot happier than the one sitting here now. 

"Trust me, Wilson," she said, "this is going to work. You'll like the result." 

He rubbed his temples wearily. All the stresses of the day—all the meetings he'd held, all the problems and deadlines and challenges he'd addressed—seemed to return to him like a hundred homing pigeons flapping their wings in his face and fighting for space on his shoulders. He wanted to shoo them all away, shoo this conversation away. 

"I don't want this party to be a lot of work for you," he said, congratulating himself for coming up with a reason she couldn't possibly object to. "Seriously, Sylvia, you have my total support to hire a caterer. That way you can enjoy the evening more." 

"Don't worry," she assured him. "Andrea, Kelly, Susan, and Rema are going to help me. Susan will do the floral arrangements, Andrea will handle the beverages, Kelly will lend us china. And Skiezer is going to grill for us." 

It was the last part that broke him. With his boss's warning not to let this event turn into a backyard barbeque, Wilson felt his stomach knot. "Sylvia, this party ... it has to be right. We need to make the right impression." 

"We'll make a great impression," Sylvia promised. "You look tired. Want some dinner?" 

"No." He thought hard. "I think we're envisioning two different parties. I'm not talking hamburgers and hot dogs. We're entertaining some very high-level people. They're used to a certain standard." 

Sylvia got to her feet slowly. Under the chandelier lights he saw the spark in her usually soft brown eyes. "What are you saying, Wilson, that our friends aren't good enough to help us throw a party?" 

"Of course not," he said, backtracking rapidly. "I just think we should get professional help." 

When she didn't reply, he added, "I don't want it to look like we can't afford to hire a caterer and have to rely on our friends. It's an image thing, Sylvia." 

"Is this how it's going to be from now on? How we look is more important than who we are? We have friends willing to help us. That's a blessing, not a liability." 

He sighed. "I'm talking one evening, Sylvia. Would it be so hard to do it the way I want?" 

She shook her head. "No, it wouldn't. But ..." 

"But what?" 

She looked into his eyes. "You're changing, Wilson, getting swept up in work—in being someone else." 

Wilson frowned. "That's just plain wrong. I'm not changing. I'm just asking for you to be conscious that my boss's bosses will be coming to our house. I'm not going to get another opportunity like this." 

He shook his head, increasingly convinced that he was right. "I really don't know why we're arguing about this." 

"We're not. Not anymore." 

Shutting the door to the sideboard gently, she gave him an angry look. "I'll look into a caterer," she said. "But you are changing. You just don't see it." 

With her back ramrod straight, she left the room. He'd won, but it gave him no pleasure.

 Wandering into the kitchen, Wilson pondered the contents of the refrigerator then closed the door. He really wasn't hungry. Maybe he had been a little too critical of Sylvia's plans, but she was definitely out of line saying that he was changing. It stung that she would think that, think the worst of him. All he wanted was to give them a better life and maybe help some other people along the way. Why couldn't she see that? Still, he didn't like it when Sylvia was mad at him. 

Truthfully he didn't know a lot about parties and entertaining. He'd grown up solidly middle class, and the most formal it got was Christmas dinner. Maybe there was a compromise. Sylvia and her friends could handle the party with the help of a caterer. He even had one in mind. Jen had given him the name that very afternoon. 

He was about to head upstairs and tell her when his cell rang. The Caller ID told him it was Bruce, and he fought the urge to pitch the phone into the garbage. These late-night calls had to stop. He punched his boss's call over to voicemail. Whatever it was could wait. 

Yet when the phone rang for the second time, he found himself less annoyed and more concerned. Computers failed all the time, maybe the server had crashed with the new upgrades. Holding the cell to his ear, he ignored the voice in his head that warned him these calls would only get worse if he became branch manager.