The Mother in the Back Row

Now he had said yes. He would drive up from Lincoln and put on a suit and walk her down the aisle in front of 160 people. And somewhere in that phone call he had said one easy sentence about how it would be simpler if we weren’t all bunched up together in the pictures, and my daughter had heard what she had been hearing since she was six. Make it easy for him, or he might not come.

I shut the water off.

“All right,” I said.

She let out a breath like she’d been holding it since Columbus. “Really?”

“It’s your day. You get one. I’ll wear beige and I’ll stand in the back.”

“Mom, thank you. It’s only the pictures, I promise. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“I gave you my word. You don’t have to sell it to me.”

She came around the table and hugged me, and I hugged her back, because she was my girl and I was not going to be the reason she cried the week of her wedding. Then she gathered up her binder and drove back to her apartment, and I sat down in her chair and looked at the place on the table where the list had been.

I did not need to look at my own list. I knew it by heart.

The barn was $4,500. The caterer out of Columbus was $6,080, which was 160 plates at thirty-eight dollars, roast beef and chicken both, with the green beans and the cheesy potatoes. The photographer was $3,400. The dress and the alterations came to $1,650. Flowers, $1,450. The DJ was $1,100, the cake was $620, and the invitations and stamps and odds and ends were another $200.

Nineteen thousand dollars, to the dollar. I had started that account the year she turned seventeen. Thirty-five dollars a week, most weeks, for eleven years, and a little extra when I picked up the dentist’s office.

Rick was paying for the bar. I want to be fair. He offered, and he did it, and Matt’s folks put on a nice rehearsal supper at the Legion hall. Nobody was a deadbeat in this. It was only that the wedding itself, the barn and the food and the flowers and the girl in the dress, was mine. I had wanted it to be mine. I’d cleaned other people’s offices at night for most of her life so that one day I could hand my daughter a wedding and not have to ask anybody for a dime of it.

I just hadn’t pictured handing it to her from the back row.

The next Tuesday I drove the twenty miles up to Columbus on my lunch hour and went to Kohl’s. I found a beige dress on the clearance rack, plain, with a little jacket, marked down to forty-four dollars. I tried it on. It fit. In the mirror I looked like a woman who had come to take the offering count.

My friend Donna, who has cleaned the bank with me for nine years, had plenty to say when I told her.

“You’re not going to do it.”

“I’m going to do exactly it.”

“Jill. Call that girl and tell her no. One phone call.”

“I could,” I said. “And she’d give in, and she’d spend her whole wedding day watching her dad’s face to see if he was put out. I’ve watched her watch his face since she was six. I’m not buying her a wedding so she can do that at it.”

“So you’ll just stand back there like the hired help.”

“I’ve been the hired help. It didn’t kill me.”