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often have to do when she wants to believe the nonsensical. “No, no fighting.”
    “But she’s still not your friend?”
    Moistening my lips, I start to explain. “I thought that my friend Avery was getting married and that she’d invited me to her wedding. But there must have been some mix-up. I didn’t know anyone at the wedding and she wasn’t even—”
    Aunt Dovie interrupts. “ Catalina Afternoon .”
    Beanie’s brow is furrowed. “Really?”
    I search their faces. Is this some kind of code? “What?”
    “ Catalina Afternoon is a movie we saw. Friends end up at the wrong wedding.” She hands heavy pottery bowls one at a time to Beanie.
    Well, I think, if I’d known that a movie title would set Beanie straight, I would have tried that tactic from the first.
    Beanie takes a bowl and ladles soup into its deep opening.
    Deciding I should make myself useful, I take the bowl and set it at the table.
    Beanie hands me another bowl. “Those friends didn’t realize they were at the wrong wedding until it was too late. Tragic, in an odd sort of way.”
    As we sit at the kitchen table with a spring breeze blowing through the opened window, my aunt offers a prayer of thanksgiving to God.
    After her joyful “Amen and amen!” I ask, “So, you’ve seen a movie about someone who ends up at the wrong wedding?”
    “Yes,” says Dovie as she passes me a basket of sliced oatmeal bread—one of her homemade specialties. “Only there was violence at that one.”
    “Three die,” Beanie adds. “Or was it four?”
    Aunt Dovie refers to movies and TV shows as examples for just about anything. “Let’s see,” she says as she butters her slice of bread with swift motions. “There was the daughter. Then the sister-in-law.”
    “And the hamster.” Beanie lets a laugh escape from her mouth like a secret.
    “Two hamsters?” asks my aunt as she chews a crust of bread. “Wasn’t one a guinea pig?”
    “No, the neighbor with the John Deere had the guinea pig. It got caught under the wheels.”
    “Was that before or after the rehearsal dinner?”
    Before Beanie can comment, I say, “Well, no one died today. In fact,” I add, smiling, “I met someone.”
    “Ohhhh,” says Beanie as she lifts a heaping spoonful of noodles into her mouth. Chewing, she says, “I’ve heard about that, too. Two people end up meeting at a wedding and then get married themselves right quick.”
    He did ask for my number . Beanie and my aunt discuss the plot of another movie they saw about a hairdresser and prison guard who met at a wedding and later married in the Grand Canyon.
    I watch the lacy daisy-colored curtains billow at the window as a hefty gust of wind enters the kitchen. I close my eyes and think of the way Taylor made me feel as we danced. When I let my mind drift back to the conversation at the table, Beanie says, “Well, the church is full of hypocrites.”
    Dovie asks, “Now, what makes you think that?” It is not the first time Beanie has said something like this. Last time I drove down for a weekend, she complained that church people wouldn’t accept her due to three failed marriages, her crooked left eyebrow, and her past obsession with Johnnie Walker.
    “Folks look at me like I shouldn’t be there.”
    “Nonsense,” Dovie cries. “The church is one place where everyone is welcomed.”
    “In theory.”
    In theory is one of Beanie’s favorite phrases.
    “In theory all should feel cozy warm at church worshiping God. But those folk choose who is welcome and who is not.”
    “Why don’t you feel welcome?” I ask.
    Beanie spits a fingernail out of her mouth. “ ’Cause they don’t like women who used to dance for a living.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I get these vibes.”
    Beanie chews her nails, trimming the ragged edges with her teeth, and when a piece winds up in her mouth, she lets it dangle on her tongue and then forces it into the garbage can when she stands to get us dessert. I start to decline