The Bride Who Lifted Her Veil
Twenty Two Years Ago in Elizabethtown
To understand what happened in that ballroom, you have to go back a long way before it, to a spring when I was twenty five years old and working two routes for a home health agency because Jon and I needed the second income and neither of us wanted to say so out loud.
One of my patients that spring was a woman dying of cancer in a rented house on the edge of town, the kind of house with a carport instead of a garage and a chain link fence somebody kept meaning to fix. She did not have much time left when I was assigned to her, and she did not have much family listed on her intake paperwork either. No husband on record. One daughter, fifteen years old, no other relatives named beyond a grandmother two states away.
I would come by every afternoon to check vitals and manage medication, and every afternoon that girl would be sitting at her mother’s kitchen table doing homework like the house around her was not falling apart. She was quiet in the particular way children get quiet when they have already learned that being loud does not fix anything. I would ask her how school was going while I worked, small talk mostly, and she would give me small, careful answers, and some days that was the only real conversation either of us had.
When her mother died, it was a Tuesday in October, and I was the one who found her that morning, because I had a key by then and the daughter had already left for school not knowing yet.
The hospital social worker made some calls and came back with almost nothing. The grandmother two states away said she was seventy eight years old and living on a fixed income and could not take in a teenager. The county was talking about an emergency foster placement, which in a rural county with three open beds that year meant a bed forty five minutes away in a different town, a different school, on top of everything else that girl had just lost. Her senior year had not even started yet, and she was going to lose it before the first bell rang.
I was not that girl’s caseworker. I was not her family. I had absolutely no standing to do anything about where she ended up, and I want to be honest that this bothered me for exactly as long as it took me to pick up the phone.