The Wedding Toast

Rogelio Batres had written the toast eleven times. At eleven o'clock on a Friday night in March, the twelfth version was folded in the inside pocket of a suit he had bought for the occasion. The reception was being held in the old drying shed of a coffee farm outside Antigua, now strung with lights and smelling faintly of roasted beans. In a few minutes he would stand up in front of a hundred and fifty guests and speak to his daughter, Ximena, for the first time in five years.

The silence had begun on the patio of his own farm. Ximena, then twenty-three, had told him that she would not be taking over the family business after all, because she had been accepted at a music school in Mexico City. He had been up since four, and a frost had ruined half the lower field. Without stopping to think, he had said the cruellest thing that came into his head: "If you walk out of that gate, don't bother coming back." She had left the next morning. Since then, whenever he had called, she had hung up after a second or two.

It was Emiliano, the groom, who had phoned him in January. Ximena had agreed to let her father come, he explained carefully, provided there was no scene. Then he mentioned, almost in passing, that the bride's father traditionally gave a toast, and that nobody else had been asked. Rogelio understood at once what was being offered. A phone call could be ended with one touch of a button, but no bride walks out of her own wedding in the middle of a speech. If he was ever going to be heard, it would have to be there, in public.

All evening, he had kept to the edge of the room. Ximena had danced with her husband, with her friends and with her aunt Licha, but not with him. Only once had their eyes met, and she had looked away before he could even smile. Now the band stopped, the lights dimmed, and the host called his name. Barely aware of the polite applause, Rogelio walked to the microphone and unfolded his cards.

The first card opened with a joke about the weather. The second listed Ximena's achievements: the scholarship, the concerts, the orchestra in Monterrey. He had found them in articles online, late at night. Looking at his own neat handwriting, he realized that none of it said what he had actually come to say. Slowly, he put the cards back in his pocket, and the room went quiet.

He turned to face his daughter. "Five years ago, I told you not to bother coming back," he said. "I've regretted it every single day since, and I should have said so long before tonight. I'm sorry, Ximena. You were right to go."

Nobody moved. Ximena sat perfectly still, her glass halfway to her lips, while Emiliano's hand found hers on the table. Then she put the glass down and crossed the dance floor to the microphone. "That's the first thing you've said to me in five years that I haven't hung up on," she said, and her voice broke on the last words. "So go on, Papá. Finish the toast. I want to hear the rest."