The Backyard Wedding Under the Cottonwood

The day

The wedding was the Saturday after Labor Day. Seventy-four degrees, a light wind out of the south, the sky so blue it looked painted. The beans across the section road were just starting to turn gold.

Mike pulled his smoker into my driveway at four thirty in the morning. By six the whole block smelled like hickory, and Marlys Olson was on her back step in her bathrobe with a cup of coffee, just breathing it in.

By ten, Tanner and two of his crew guys had the tent up over the patio. By noon, the chairs were in rows on the lawn with a strip of grass down the middle about five feet wide. Tanner mowed that strip twice, on the lowest blade.

Abby got ready upstairs in her old bedroom with her two bridesmaids. Once I heard her crying, and when I went up, all three of them were crying over a card Tanner had sent up with his best man. She would not let me read it. She said it was hers.

I put on my good blue dress around three, the only nice thing I own that is not black for funerals. I decided I looked like exactly what I was: a school secretary on the best day of her life.

Then I went out front to help Mike unload the last chairs from his tailgate, because there are always more people than you counted.

Five thirty

At five thirty, a black Tahoe with a Haugen Motors plate frame turned onto my street.

I knew it before I saw who was driving. It came down the block slow, like a car looking for an address, though he lived at this one for nine years.

It pulled up to the curb in front of my mailbox. The engine stopped.

I was standing at the end of the driveway holding a folding chair. Mike had gone around back with the last load. It was just me and the car.

I watched the passenger side. I could not see through the tint. I waited for that door the way you wait for a test result.

Nobody got out on the passenger side.

The driver’s door opened, and Greg got out alone.

He was wearing a navy suit I had never seen and a tie the gray blue of Abby’s eyes. He had a fresh haircut, the kind you get the day before something. He was an hour early.

He looked up past my roof at the cottonwood first. You can see the top of it from the street. You can see the lights, and if you know where to look, you can see the two ropes.

Then he buttoned his jacket and walked up my driveway toward me.

He stopped about six feet away. He looked at the chair in my hands. He looked at me. He looked older than I remembered, which is a stupid thing to think about somebody you have seen at every graduation and Christmas for seventeen years. But he did. He looked fifty-five.

“Lori,” he said.

“Greg.”

He put his hands in his pockets, then took them out again. “What can I carry?” he said.

I stood there. Of everything I had imagined him saying, in the car, at the curb, all the nights since April, I had not once imagined that.

“There’s more chairs,” I said. “In Mike’s truck.”

“Okay,” he said. He took off his suit jacket, and I held out my hand and took it. He walked past me to Mike’s pickup and started pulling chairs off the tailgate, two at a time, like a man who has unloaded a lot of trucks.