My groom pushed my face into our cake in front of everybody and called it a BIT, and I was still swallowing when my brother stood up.
Only two people on my side ever met Travis: my mom, Colleen, and my brother Shane, who is thirty-five. Our dad died when we were small.
The one thing of his I wanted was the silver cake server my mom kept in a dish towel since 1989.
She carried it into the hall in Dunmore and set it by the plates.
They both liked him. Ninety-six people were coming and everybody said I was lucky.
Two weeks out I told my mom I had a BAD feeling about the cake.
“He wouldn’t do that to you,” she said. “Not to your face.”
His groomsmen had a joke, and every time it came up Travis looked at me and said NOTHING.
I asked him straight out that Thursday. “You worry like it’s a job,” he said.
“You want me to hold it?” Shane said at the hall, and I said no.
That morning it all looked right. My mom crying, Shane in a rented jacket, Travis grinning like he’d won a raffle.
I let myself believe it.
For about four hours.
They called us up to cut. I put my hand on Dad’s server and Travis put his over mine.
I thought we were doing one slice together.
Instead he took the back of my head and SHOVED IT DOWN.
The room made a sound.
Frosting in my hair, up my nose, down the dress and the veil.
I stood there.
I had a lump coming up that would win in about TEN seconds.
Somebody at table four laughed, then a few more.
My mom put her hand over her mouth.
Travis scraped a smear off my chin with his thumb and tasted it.
“Sweet,” he said. “Just like her.”
Then he wiped Dad’s server on the tablecloth and dropped it in the wreck.
That’s when Shane pushed his chair back. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at the table.
Nobody in that hall could have guessed what he did next. It went DEAD SILENT. ⬇️
The rented jacket
He came around the end of the table with his hand already out and put it into the cake.
Into it. Past the wrist. He felt around in there the way you feel around in a couch for keys, and he came up with Dad’s server.
Then he opened the rented jacket and wiped the server on the lining. Both sides. Slow. Frosting all down the inside of a coat he had to return Monday morning.
He carried it to my mom. He put it in her hands and closed her fingers on it and held them shut a second, and she started shaking under his hands.
I was still standing at the table with cake in my ear. There was a plastic bride and groom on the corner of the sheet that had come with the cake and nobody ordered, and it had gone over on its side.
My mom didn’t look at the server. She looked at Shane’s sleeve, at the frosting up his arm, and she made a noise like she was going to apologize to him for it.
Travis was laughing when Shane started walking, and by the time Shane got to my mother he had stopped. Table four had stopped. The DJ had his hand flat on the board.
Ninety-six people and I could hear the ice machine behind the bar.
Shane turned around. He didn’t look at me and he didn’t look at Travis. He looked at the four groomsmen standing together by the window with their drinks.
“Which one of you filmed it,” he said.
Not a question the way I’m writing it. He said it flat, like he already had the answer and was giving them one chance to say it themselves.
Nobody said anything. Somebody’s kid was crying in the back.
Kyle put his phone in his pocket.
A dish towel since 1989
My dad died in 2003. I was six. Shane was twelve and he remembers a whole man, and I remember a coat that smelled like the inside of a truck and one time at a lake.
He and my mom got married in 1989 and somebody gave them a silver cake server with their initials on the handle, R and C, and a date. They used it once. Then it went in a dish towel in the second drawer down and it stayed there for thirty-four years.
That’s the whole shrine. No urn on a shelf, no photo wall. A drawer with the tape measure and the good scissors and a dish towel with a dead man’s cake server in it.
When I got engaged I asked my mom for one thing. She said yes before I finished the sentence.
The other thing my dad left was money. Not a lot. There was insurance and it went on the roof and Shane’s braces and years, and by the time I was twenty-nine what was left of it was four thousand two hundred dollars, and I put every cent of it on the deposit for that hall.
I want to be honest about that. It was mine to spend. But I sat in the office in Dunmore with the woman going through the packages and I wrote out a check with my father’s money and felt like I was doing something for him instead of to him.
The woman had a binder with the room in four different lighting setups and a laminated page for the cake, tiers and prices going up in steps. I picked the sheet. Travis said tiers were for people with something to prove, and I liked that about him for a while.
Shane didn’t come to that meeting. Shane worked Saturdays. Shane also didn’t say one word against Travis in two years, which I took as approval, and which I have since asked him about, and he said, “You were happy,” which is not the same thing and he knew it wasn’t when he said it.
Travis came to that meeting. He asked good questions. He asked about the linens.
He asked, in the car after, what the server was worth.
I told him nothing, probably, it’s plate, it’s not even real silver all the way through, and he said that’s not what I meant, and I let it go because I was tired and the woman had said the word “final” about nine times.
Three weeks before the wedding my mom called me and she was so pleased with herself I could hear it.
“He asked me to bring it,” she said. “Travis. He called me on a Tuesday, honey. He said it would mean a lot to you.”
The spoon
The joke started at somebody’s bachelor party in March, before mine, and it came home with the four of them.
The word was “the spoon.”
That’s it. That’s all I ever got. One of them would say it and the whole side of the table would go, and Travis would look at me across whatever we were sitting at and his face would do nothing at all. Not embarrassed. Not sorry. Nothing, on purpose, held there until I looked away.
I asked once at a bar. Kyle said it was a work thing. Travis worked at a countertop place with two of them, so I let that be true for a month.
I did the math on it anyway, the way you do at two in the morning. Spoon. A spoon is a wedding thing or a drug thing or a nothing thing. I went through his truck once while he was inside paying for gas, which I’m not proud of, and found a phone charger and a parking pass and a rolled-up sock, and I sat back in my seat and decided I was the problem.
His mother liked me. That was the other thing holding the whole month up. Pam sent me a photo of her own veil in a box in case I wanted it, and you don’t get a mother like that behind a man who is going to do something to you.
At the rehearsal dinner Kyle stood up on a chair to get a picture of the long table and he said it into the room. “Don’t forget the spoon.”
Six people laughed. My mother laughed because everyone else did, she’d tell you that herself.
I went out to the parking lot and stood by the ice cooler in a dress and I did the thing where you talk yourself down. He’s not like that. His mother is right there. Shane is right there.
Then I went back in and did the toast.
That night I told Shane the word. He asked me what it meant and I said I don’t know, and he asked if I’d asked, and I said I asked and Kyle said it was a work thing.
Shane said, “Do you believe him?”
I said the thing you say. I said we’re two days out.
Thursday, in his car
We were parked outside my mom’s building with the engine running because he had to be somewhere.
I asked him straight. What is the spoon. Why does your face do that.
“You worry like it’s a job,” he said.
Then he laughed and squeezed the back of my neck the way he did and said, and I remember this exactly, “You’re going to be so embarrassed about all this on Sunday.”
That’s how good he was. That line got me out of the car happy.
Inside, I told my mom to leave the server home.
Not because I’d figured anything out. Because I had a stomach and my stomach was a fist and I wanted one thing of my father’s in a drawer where nothing could happen to it.
She was doing dishes and she didn’t turn the water off, which is how I knew she’d been waiting for me to bring it up and had her answer ready.
She said what she said. He wouldn’t do that to you. Not to your face.
I said men do things at weddings, Mom. I said there’s a hundred videos. I said I’m not asking you to think anything about him, I’m asking you to leave a piece of silverware in a drawer for one day.
She said the towel it lives in came off a roll her mother bought, and I said that’s not an answer, and she said it wasn’t supposed to be.
I said I’m not saying he would, I’m saying leave it home, and she got that look she gets when I’m managing her, and she said, “He asked me special.”
So Saturday morning she brought it in her purse wrapped in the dish towel, and she set it by the plates on the round table with the sheet cake, and she stood there with her hand on the edge of the table so nobody would move it.
Shane saw my face.
“You want me to hold it?” he said.
I said no. I said the day’s already started, don’t make it a thing.
He looked at the server for a while.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s your day.”
Kyle’s phone
Kyle gave the phone up on his own.
He didn’t hand it to Shane. He walked past Shane and put it in my mother’s hand, on top of the server she was still holding, and he said, “It’s not locked.”
My mother has never opened another person’s phone in her life. She stood there with cake on her sleeve and she opened it.
It was already on the group. Five of them in it. Kyle’s thumb had been on that screen ninety seconds before, filming.
She read it out loud because she reads things out loud, at pharmacy counters, at the DMV, she just does it.
Tuesday, three weeks back, from Travis. “asked her mom to bring the thing. shes bringing it.”
Then a picture of the round table taken that morning, before anybody was seated, the sheet cake and the two plates and the server laid out on the towel.
Then Kyle. “front left, i got the angle.”
Then Travis again, that morning, 11:52. “spoon or it doesnt count.”
My mother read that one twice. The second time she read it slower, like the words had been printed wrong.
“What does that mean,” she said. “Spoon or it doesn’t count.”
Nobody answered her, so she turned the phone around and held it up at Travis’s chest, arm straight out, and she said it again.
Kyle said, “There was money on it.”
Forty dollars. That was the pool. Forty dollars, and the rule they’d made in March was that it had to be with the old one, the family one, or it was just cake and it didn’t count.
They didn’t pick my head. They picked my father’s server, and then they went and got it, and my mother carried it in for them in her purse.
And the picture of the table was taken at 8:40 in the morning, before the chairs were set, which means somebody walked that room early to make sure the thing had come.
My mother kept scrolling with one knuckle. She got up past March and there was the whole spring of it, the bachelor party, a video somebody took in a kitchen of a guy shoving a girl’s face into a pan of brownies, forty-one seconds, and under it Travis had put six letters and a laughing face.
She said, “This is from April.”
That was the worst one for me. Not the shove. April.
She sat down on the floor. Not dramatic. Her knees went and she sat down next to the gift table with the server in her fist and the phone still lit up in her other hand.
The ring in the frosting
Travis talked for a long time. I’ve never heard him talk that much.
He started with the word bit. It was a BIT. Everybody does it, look it up, it’s on the internet a thousand times, his cousin got one in the face in Erie two summers ago and she thought it was funny.
Then he did the part where the room was against him. “Sit down,” he told his own mother, and she didn’t.
Then he came at me for my face. “Look at her. Look at her standing there. This is what she does. She does this at Christmas.”
Then he came at the money. “You want to blow up a thirty-one-thousand-dollar day over a serving spoon? Your mother’s on the floor over a serving spoon.”
He said the word forty like it helped him. “It was forty dollars. Forty. I didn’t even take it, ask them, I never took the money.”
Somebody’s aunt at table four said, out loud, “Oh, that’s worse.”
Then he said it, and the room got it before I did.
“It’s not your dad, Colleen. It’s a spoon. He’s been dead twenty-two years. It’s a spoon in a rag in your kitchen.”
Kyle went outside. Two of the other groomsmen went out behind him and didn’t come back in.
His mother, Pam, had been at table two the whole time with her purse on her lap. She got up and went to the DJ and said something and the music that had been sitting there at nothing came all the way off, and then she came back across the floor and put her hand out for Travis’s keys.
He said, “Mom.”
She said, “I paid for the bar. Go sit in my car.”
I had cake in my collar and my veil was ruined and I had said maybe eleven words since he put his hand on the back of my head.
I got the ring off. It took a couple tries because my hands were slick.
I walked to the table and pushed it into the frosting, into the hole Shane’s arm had made, and I pushed it down until I couldn’t see it.
Then I went and got my mother up off the floor. That took both hands and Kyle’s girlfriend, who I had met twice.
“You’re insane,” Travis said. “You’re actually insane. Over a spoon.”
Pam took his elbow.
“Travis,” she said. “Everybody heard you.”
Colleen’s kitchen table
Three weeks later, Shane’s birthday, a sheet cake from the Giant with his name spelled right.
My mom took the server out of the drawer, out of the dish towel, and set it by the plates.
There’s a place on the flat part where the edge is bent up a little from getting dropped in there and stepped near, and a gray line in the engraving that didn’t come out with the polish. She tried. She’s still trying, honestly, every few days at the sink.
The four thousand two hundred is gone. The hall kept it, it was in the contract, the woman was kind about it and kept it anyway. Shane paid ninety dollars for the ruined jacket and won’t take it from me.
Ninety-six people know. That’s the part I thought would kill me and it doesn’t, most days.
My mom held the handle out to me across the table.
I said Shane should do it, it’s his birthday.
“No,” she said. “You. Go on. Cut it.”
If this one sat wrong in your chest, send it to whoever in your family is keeping the one thing nobody else thought was worth anything.
For more intense family drama, check out how My Mother Paid Her Twelve Dollars An Hour To Drive Her Eleven Miles, or read about how His Mother Called Me Twenty Minutes After I Landed and My Parents Put Forty-One Thousand Dollars Into This House. I Cooked All Day.
