The Mother in the Back Row

“I believe you,” I said. And I did. I had seen her face in the gravel at three o’clock, and now I knew what had been on it.

“May I?”

“Go ahead.”

So my daughter’s stepmother pinned my corsage to my beige jacket, in the doorway of the barn, with a hundred and sixty people looking on. She did a neat job of it. Bookkeepers have good hands. Then she turned to Lauren.

“Honey, you take these over. All of them, the family ones. I’ll hold your bouquet.” She took it right off the table. “I’ve got no business in the middle of that picture. I’ve got a husband, and I came into a girl who was already raised. I know who did the raising.”

“Sandra, you don’t have to stand out,” Lauren said.

“I want to. For this one.” And she stepped back out of the light and stood with the flowers in both hands, and she smiled at me, and I have thought about that smile a good many times since. It cost her something. She paid it without being asked.

That left Rick.

He had not moved. He was standing with his hands at his sides in his good charcoal suit, and he looked every one of his fifty-eight years. I thought he would stay quiet. He always had. Staying quiet and being elsewhere were the two things Rick was best at.

He cleared his throat.

“I’ll say this once, and then I’ll get out of the way,” he said. He was not a man for speeches and it came out rough. “Lauren didn’t think that up by herself. I told her on the phone it would go easier on Sandra if we weren’t all bunched together up front. I put it on Sandra. It wasn’t Sandra. It was me.”

Nobody made a sound.

“It’s a hard thing to stand next to the person who did your share for twenty-two years and smile for a camera. That’s what it was. I didn’t want to stand there. So I fixed it so I wouldn’t have to, and I let my daughter carry the message, and I let her mother take it.” He looked at me, and for the first time since 2004 he did not look away again. “Jill. You raised her. I visited. I’ve owed you a thank you and an apology for a long time and I never had the nerve for either one. I’m sorry. And thank you. She’s the best thing I ever had a part in, and my part was the small one.”

I had waited twenty-two years for something, and I had not known it was that until I heard it.

“Thank you, Rick,” I said. It was all I had, and it was enough. “She’s glad you came. So am I. You walked her down fine.”

He nodded. His eyes were red. Then he did a thing I will give him credit for until I die. He walked around behind us, to the back row, to the left end, and stood beside the hay bale where my purse and coat were sitting.

“I’ll take this spot,” he said. “It’s been warmed up.”

A few people laughed, the wet kind of laugh. Matt went and stood beside him, all six foot three of him. “I’m tall,” Matt said. “I belong back here anyhow.” And Jeff said, “Well, shoot,” and went back there too, and that was three grown men in the back row, shoulder to shoulder, which is where the tall ones go in any decent photograph.