Instead, she looked around the hall at the staring guests, at the hole gouged in her cake, at the photographer lowering his camera.
And she exploded.
I waited for Ashley to apologize.
“Do you have any idea how much money I’ve spent making this wedding perfect?”
Daniel studied her for a long moment.
“Apparently,” he said, “not enough to pay Grandma.”
Ashley’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Not a sound.
Then she gathered up her skirts, turned on her heel, and stormed out through the barn doors, veil snapping behind her like a flag.
“Not enough to pay Grandma.”
The 150 guests watched in silence.
The cake sat beside my table, tall and ivory and wounded, with a big crater in its middle where my brother’s spoon had gone in.
Grandma looked at it.
She dabbed her eyes with a napkin. Then she sighed, the deep, practical sigh of a woman who has seen a lot of disasters in a lot of kitchens.
