The Mother in the Back Row

“Beige,” I said. “You want me in beige.”

“Or tan. Or that oatmeal color. Something that doesn’t pull the eye, Mom.”

My daughter sat across my kitchen table with her wedding binder open between us, nine days before the first Saturday in October. She had a pen in her hand and she kept clicking it. She had done that since the third grade whenever she had to tell me something she knew I would not like.

“I already have a dress, Lauren. The blue one. You were with me when I bought it.”

“I know. That’s sort of the trouble.” Click, click. “Sandra bought hers last week, and it’s blue. Almost the same blue. She sent me a picture.”

“Then I’ll wear mine and she’ll wear hers, and there will be two women in blue. Nobody ever died of it.”

“It’s the photographs.” She turned the binder around so I could read it. She had typed up a list for the photographer, every picture she wanted, in the order she wanted them. “Dad’s walking me down. He and Sandra are going to be in the family ones up front, on my side. And if you’re up there too, in the same color, it looks like, I don’t know. Like a set. Like there are two mothers of the bride.”

“There’s one mother of the bride.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

She put the pen down. “Mom. Please. It’s the pictures and nothing else. You sit in the front row for the ceremony. You sit at the family table. I’m only asking you to wear something neutral, and for the family photographs, stand in the back row. On the end, maybe. So it isn’t awkward.”

“Awkward for who?”

She didn’t answer that right away, and when she did she looked at the binder and not at me.

“Dad said it would be easier on Sandra.”

I got up and ran water in the sink. There was nothing in the sink to wash. I ran it anyway and looked out the window at my clothesline and the neighbor’s grain bin beyond it, and I counted to ten the way I learned to do when Lauren was small and I was tired.

I want to be plain about what I was looking at while I counted, because it is the whole reason for what I did next.

I was not looking at a spoiled girl. I was looking at a six-year-old on the front step of a rented house on North Fifth Street, with her backpack on and her shoes tied, waiting for a pickup that came about one Saturday in three.

Rick left in the spring of 2004. There was no other woman then, whatever people said at the time. He just could not stand David City or me or being poor in front of people who knew him, and he took a job in Lincoln selling farm equipment and did not come back. He paid his support, $310 a month, and I will say this for him: it came, and mostly on time, right up until she turned nineteen, which is when it stops in Nebraska. But a check is not a father. He came up two or three times a year after the first one. He married Sandra when Lauren was sixteen.

And for twenty-two years my daughter had been trying out for the part of his daughter. Good grades, he ought to know about those. Homecoming court, send him the picture. Nursing school, call him first.