A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father by Augusten Burroughs

back yonder on the other side of the railroad tracks in the little shantytown where all the Negroes lived. But my mother considered Lucille part of  her  family, not belonging to a husband and children of her own.
    My mother’s mother had pulled her into the bedroom before the ceremony began and whispered, “Now, Margaret? You’re doing the right thing. John is a fine young man and you will be very happy.”
    Lucille had pulled her aside, too. She’d hugged her to her ample bosom and whispered into her ear, “Child, I am gonna miss you. You make sure he treat you right, you hear?” She didn’t say to my mother that there was something funny in the young man’s eyes, something not quite right. Best to keep that to herself.
    My mother had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from crying and spoiling her makeup. She nodded her head and whispered, “I will.”
    After the minister pronounced them man and wife, my mother and father posed in front of the wedding cake, three tiers, white frosting with white flowers. My mother cut the first slice and my father reached down and broke away a corner, stiff with frosting. As he placed the morsel in her mouth, my mother reached up with her hand and let her fingers rest on his wrist. She could feel his pulse racing. The frosting was so sweet it seemed to burn her tongue.
    “After it was all over, we posed for photographs. Really, the only thing that had changed was that I now had a band of gold on my left hand. But it seemed to me that  everything  was different, even the air. It was thicker, somehow. And I felt so far away, as if I’d traveled. We were in the same room, with the same people, in the same clothes, and yet I felt so removed. I reached down and placed my hands on the little flower girl’s shoulders. Her hair smelled like Johnson’s Baby Shampoo and I just wanted to cry. I wanted to lean over and whisper something to the flower girl. I wanted to warn her. But of what? What would I have said? So I just stood there and I smiled and your father stood next to me and he smiled, too. And we were married and all the windows were open but the smell of flowers was so thick and sickly sweet, I felt like I might choke to death.”
    My mother closed her eyes. “Mom?” I said. “Are you okay?”
    She turned around and pressed her cigarette out in the ashtray she’d set on the dining room table. “It just makes me sad to think back, that’s all.”
    “But he became a minister, right?” I asked, veering away from the wedding, trying to steer her from the sadness.
    “Well, yes,” she said. “He was a Presbyterian minister but only for a short time. Your father decided after a bit that he didn’t believe in God. And that’s when he went back to graduate school and became a philosophy professor.”
    I wondered again what it meant to be a philosopher. I could spell the word but I could not define it.
    I’d asked my father, over and over, “What does it mean?” And he’d said, “Son, it’s too complicated to explain.”
    “What is a philosopher?” I asked my mother now.
    “Oh, that’s something you should ask your father,” she said, as she drifted away from her easel, ambled over to the sofa, and sat.
    I followed her. Images of my father were swirling in my head, down on one knee proposing, lifting a gun to his forehead. I’d heard the story of how my parents met a million times but suddenly now, I only wanted to crawl under the coffee table and curl up. I thought of her wedding cake, how pretty it must have been, encrusted with flowers made of frosting, ropes of creamy white. “And the cake was really good, wasn’t it?” I asked.
    My mother hadn’t heard me. She sighed and continued in a flat, lifeless voice. “Your father had so much rage toward his mother, I suppose for leaving him when he was so little, letting her daddy raise him. Or maybe he was angry that she even came back for him at all, maybe he only wanted to stay with Dandy and the