The Mother in the Back Row

Donna shook her head and went back to her vacuum. But on the wedding morning she came by at eight with a pan of apricot and poppy seed kolaches for the dessert table, forty-eight of them, still warm, and she looked at me in my beige and didn’t say one word. That was a kindness.

The barn sits about four miles east of town on a gravel road, an old hay barn a couple from Omaha fixed up, with the big doors on the west end so the light comes straight in at the end of the day. It was a harvest wedding. You could see combine dust hanging over the fields to the south, and half the men there had been in a cab until noon and had the sunburned necks to show for it. Matt’s father, Jeff, had shut his own combine down for the day with 300 acres of beans still standing, which around here is about the nicest thing a man can do for his son.

I got there at one to meet the caterer and check the tables. Lauren was in the bride’s room with her bridesmaids, and I went in and did up the buttons on the back of her dress, thirty-one of them, covered, with the little loops. My fingers knew that kind of work. She watched me in the mirror.

“You look nice, Mom.”

“I look like a manila envelope. But thank you.”

She laughed, and then her eyes filled, and I said, “None of that, you’ll run your face,” and she fanned at them with both hands. For a minute it was only the two of us, the way it had been for most of her life.

The florist had left the personal flowers in a white box in the cooler. Two bouquets’ worth of boutonnieres, the bridesmaids’ flowers, and two corsages in little plastic shells with pins. One said Sandra on a sticker. One said Mom.

I looked at the one that said Mom for a while. Then I left it in the box. A woman standing in the back row on the end does not need a flower on her shoulder to do it.

Rick and Sandra pulled in at three. I had not seen him in the flesh in four years. He was grayer and heavier and he had on a good charcoal suit, and when he got out of the car he stood in the gravel for a second like a man deciding which way the wind was blowing.

“Jill.”

“Rick. You found it all right.”

“Sandra had it on her phone.” He looked at the barn. “This is some place. Lauren did good.”

“She did.”

He nodded, and I nodded, and that was all either of us could come up with after twenty-two years.

Sandra came around the car. I had met her only twice. She is a few years younger than I am, a bookkeeper at an implement dealer in Lincoln, soft-spoken, the kind of woman who brings a covered dish to things. She had on the blue dress. It was a pretty blue. It was very nearly my blue.

She stopped when she saw me. She looked at the beige dress, down and up, one time. Something went across her face that I could not read then.

“Jill, you look lovely,” she said. “It’s a beautiful place. You must have worked so hard.”

“Lauren did the planning. I just showed up with the kolaches.”

She started to say something else. Then one of the bridesmaids came running to take her to get her corsage pinned, and the moment went by.