Socks

It was the month of my wedding; I thought the napkins were in the box. These napkins were a particular point of contention for me. I was dead set against them. As dead set as you can be against something that is actually going to happen. My stepmother insisted on printing them with a photograph of my fiancé and I, trying on hats. She’d designed a monogram to be positioned underneath this: the first letters of our names, connected by an illustrated version of a bubbling champagne glass. A complicated substitute for an ampersand, if you ask me.
We’d invited 50 people to the wedding, but she’d ordered 300 napkins. She told me we could use them again on our wedding anniversary, wouldn’t that be fun? So when my father came up the stairs from the garage into the kitchen with a big bucket of fried chicken on top of a larger, brown box, I thought that the oft-discussed napkins had finally arrived. My plan was to open them, to act enthusiastically, and then to hide them in the attic. Because everyone in my family had been coasting along in high spirits, attacking the wedding to-do list with tremendous good cheer, I felt sure that if these napkins went missing on The Best Day of My Life, my stepmother would turn to me and bravely say, “They’re only napkins!” and that this act of benevolence would do more for our relationship than the fact that she’d wanted to make me customized cocktail napkins in the first place.
But my father acted very shy and surreptitious, and made as if to hide the box away from us, which made it even more obvious that its contents were for me. So I leapt up from the table and lunged for the bottom box, knowing full well that my father’s instincts for survival would cause him to grab the bucket of fried chicken posed on top of it less it tumble to the floor, and this is exactly what happened. My stepmother beamed as I stole away behind the kitchen table with my booty, safely out of reach.
Using my sharpest fingernail, I dug underneath the packing tape and peeled it back with a tug. Across the room, my father held his breath. Gleefully, I pulled apart the cardboard flaps to reveal four dozen pairs of tiny white athletic socks, their reinforced pink tips touching like the snouts of sleeping piglets.
“Dad?” I said, looking across the kitchen to where he stood hugging the greasy bucket against his sweater.
“I got them on EBay!” he exclaimed.
I lifted out a single specimen to try and understand whose feet, exactly, the small white socks were for.