The Pews My Parents Never Filled

Walking Myself Down The Aisle

There was no one to walk me down the aisle, so I walked myself.

I had thought, in the weeks leading up to the wedding, that this would be the hardest part, the moment where the absence would be loudest. I was wrong. The organ started, the doors opened, and I walked past that entire empty side of the church with my chin up, past every ribboned pew that should have held my father’s stiff posture and my mother’s disapproving mouth and my sister’s practiced smile, and none of it followed me.

Elliot stood at the front in a suit his mother had pressed twice, watching me the whole way like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at. I focused on his face and let the empty pews become just furniture. Wood and ribbon. Nothing more.

I made it almost to the front before Reverend Whitlock opened his Bible to begin.

That was when the back doors of the church swung open.

The Headlights

It was still bright enough outside that headlights shouldn’t have mattered, but a car had pulled in fast enough and close enough to the front steps that its beams swept across the stained glass and lit up every pew on both sides of the church at once, groom’s side and bride’s side, for one long second, before the engine cut off.

I didn’t turn around right away. Eleven years of hard phone calls and hospital corridors and farm accidents had taught me not to react to a sound before I understood it. But I heard Bonita’s sharp intake of breath from the front row, and I heard the murmur ripple back through the full side of the church, and I knew before I turned that it was them.

My mother came through the doors first, in a coat that was too formal for a country church, scanning the pews the way she used to scan a restaurant to see who else might be watching us. My father was a step behind her, hat in hand, the same silence on his face he’d worn on the phone. And behind both of them, hanging back in the doorway like she wasn’t sure she was allowed in either, was Candace.