The Mother in the Back Row

The ceremony was at four. Our pastor from the Methodist church drove out to do it. I sat in the front row on the left, where the mother of the bride sits, exactly as I had been promised. Rick walked her down between the hay bales and the mums, and I will tell the truth, he did it well. He kept his eyes front and his arm steady, and when the pastor asked who gives this woman, he said, “Her mother and I do.”

I had not expected that. I looked at my hands.

Then Matt took her, and Rick sat down in the front row on the other side of the aisle with Sandra, and my daughter got married with the west doors open and the sun coming in gold across the floorboards.

I cried at the right places. So did Sandra. I saw her.

The photographs were right after, while the caterers set the buffet and the guests went for lemonade. The photographer was a young woman from Seward named Paige, twenty-six maybe, in black pants and flat shoes, with two cameras slung on her and a sheet of paper folded in her back pocket. Lauren had found her online. She and Matt had driven down to Seward to meet her and had signed her contract themselves. When the $1,000 deposit came due in March, I put the money into Lauren’s checking account, the same as I had for the barn and the caterer, and Lauren paid it from there. So that young woman had never heard my name or laid eyes on me before that afternoon, and I had never laid eyes on her.

“All right, families,” she called. “Bride’s side first. I need Dad, I need Sandra, grandparents, everybody on my list.”

She took the paper out of her pocket and read from it. She set Lauren and Matt in the middle of the big doorway. She put Rick at Lauren’s right hand and Sandra beside him. She put Rick’s mother in a chair in front. She put Lauren’s cousins on the ends.

Then she looked at the paper again, and looked around, and found me. “Jill? Are you Jill? You’re in the back for me, please, on the left end. Right there. Perfect.”

I went where she pointed. There was a hay bale at the edge of the doorway with a pot of mums on it, and I stood beside that. I held my little purse in front of me with both hands, because I did not know what else to do with them.

From back there I could see the back of my daughter’s veil and about half of the photographer.

“Big smiles. Sandra, chin up a little for me. Beautiful. Dad, hand on her arm. Hold it.”

The camera clicked a dozen times.

“Now just bride and groom with Dad and Sandra, please. Everybody else, take a rest.”

Everybody else stepped out. I stepped out the farthest, since I was already on the end. I stood by my hay bale in the long light and watched a girl I had carried and fed and sat up with take a picture with her parents, and I was not one of them.

I would like to tell you I felt nothing. I felt it the way you feel a tooth.

Matt saw. He is a quiet boy, a welder at the trailer plant in town, six foot three, and he does not miss much. While Paige was changing a lens he came over to me with his hands in his pockets.