It Would Have Made the Difference That I Would Have Moved the Table

The call lasted forty minutes and Erin spent most of it listening to a version of the argument she had already predicted, almost line for line, in the bath.

We didn’t want to upset you.

You had so much on with the venue.

It wasn’t really our business to tell you.

It might have blown over.

And then, at about minute nineteen, the one Erin had been waiting for:

What difference would it have made?

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“It would have made the difference,” said Erin, “that I would have moved the table.”

There was a silence on the line.

“That’s all,” she said. “That is the entire thing, Mum. Fifteen minutes with a pencil. I’d have put Gerry on table four with the golf people, who’d have loved him, and Faye and Sean on nine with my school lot, who’d have looked after them, and Bridget would still have been on an end because of her ear.”

“Erin—”

“Nobody would have had a bad day. Not one person. Gerry would have had a lovely time, which he did anyway, and Faye would have had a lovely time, which she absolutely did not, and I’d never have known there was anything to know.”

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“Instead,” she said, “seven people had a horrible afternoon at my wedding, and I found out from a nine-year-old at ten past four.”

“She wasn’t supposed to hear that.”

“Mum, that is not the bit.”

---

“We were protecting you,” her mother said.

And Erin said the thing that she has since had quoted back to her by two friends and one cousin, and that she did not plan and has never improved on.

“You were protecting yourselves from having to say it out loud.”

---

Her mother did not answer for a while.

“And I’d have forgiven that,” said Erin, more quietly. “Honestly. If you’d told me on the day — if you’d got me in that corridor at two o’clock and said, love, there’s a thing, Gerry and Faye have had a falling out over money — I’d have said right, fine, and moved two cards, and we’d have laughed about it at Christmas.”

“Would you?”

“Yes. Because it would have been a mess. What it is instead is a decision.” She had got up and was standing at the window by then. “Four of you decided, separately, over six months, that I could not be trusted with a fact about my own family at my own wedding. And you all made the same decision, and none of you checked it with each other, and none of you checked it with me.”

---

There was a long pause.

Then her mother said, “I didn’t think of it like that,” and Erin believed her, and that was somehow the most tiring part of the whole call.

---

“What do you want me to do?” her mother said, eventually.

“Nothing,” said Erin. “There’s nothing to do. That’s what I keep trying to tell you. It’s done. Faye stood up for forty minutes with her coat on at my wedding and there is no version of today where that did not happen.”

“So why are we—”

“Because I want you to know that I know,” said Erin. “And because the next time there’s a thing — and there’ll be a thing, Mum, there’s always a thing — I want you to ring me and say it badly, at a bad time, in the wrong words. I would genuinely rather have that. I’d rather have you crying down the phone at me in August than everybody being beautifully behaved in September.”

---

They finished the call more or less civilly.

Daniel, who had been sitting on the end of the bed through the entire thing pretending to look at his phone, said, “Are you all right?”

“No,” said Erin. “But I’ve said it.”

Then she got dressed, and they went down for the leftover breakfast, and on the way through reception she saw the easel with the table plan on it, folded up against the wall, waiting to be thrown out.

She took it with her.