The Backyard Wedding Under the Cottonwood

The backyard

Mike came around the side of the house and saw him and stopped dead.

For a second I thought something was going to happen. My brother is not a fighter, but he has never once said Greg’s name in my house without his jaw doing something. He looked at Greg, and Greg looked at him, with four church chairs hanging off his arms.

“Greg,” Mike said.

“Mike.” Greg nodded toward the backyard. “Where do you want these?”

Mike looked at me. I did not know what to tell him with my face, so I just held up Greg’s jacket. Mike took a long breath through his nose.

“Back row on the left,” he said. “We’re short four.”

Twenty minutes later Mike brought Greg a paper plate with a pulled pork slider on it, without a word, and Greg ate it standing up. That is how men in my family make peace. They feed each other and do not discuss it.

Greg set up the last chairs. Then he asked Tanner if there was anything else. Tanner looked at him carefully and said, “Tent stakes on the north side could use another tap. Mallet’s by the steps.”

So Greg pounded tent stakes in a white dress shirt while I stood on the patio holding his jacket.

I went over finally. “Where’s Brittany?” I asked. I asked it plain. I did not want it to sound like anything.

He kept his eyes on the stake. “Home,” he said.

“Is she all right?”

He hit the stake once more, hard, and straightened up. “She’s not all right. She’s not mad either. She’s sad.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. “We had a long talk last night. Longest one we’ve had since we got married.”

I waited.

“She asked me to stay home,” he said. “Not to punish anybody. She just said she couldn’t stand to be in that yard. She said everybody would be looking at her the whole time, thinking about the money and the third row.” He looked at the mallet in his hand. “She was probably right about that.”

“So you came anyway.”

“I told her my daughter asked me one question on the back of a card,” he said. “And I wasn’t going to answer it with a no.” He set the mallet down. “I told her I’d be home by ten. I love her, Lori. I know you don’t want to hear that.”

“I don’t mind hearing it,” I said, and I was surprised to find out that was true.

Under the cottonwood

It was after six when I lost track of him. Guests were coming through the side gate by then, the Olsons’ grandkids and Abby’s friends from the clinic and half of the church choir, and the bridesmaids were running up and down the stairs with bobby pins, and I could not find my reading glasses for the program.

I found Greg at the back of the yard, under the cottonwood. He was standing in front of the swing.

He had one hand on the rope. He was not pulling it or pushing it. He was just holding it, the way you hold the railing on a staircase you have climbed a thousand times. The string lights had just come on above him, and the board was swaying a little in the south wind.

I stopped a few feet behind him. I don’t think he heard me.

“I used marine rope,” he said, without turning around. So he had heard me. “From Kibble’s. The guy said it would outlast me. I said good.”

“It did,” I said.

“She was four. She made me push her for an hour. You stood right about where you are and told me I was going to fall out of that tree and break my neck.” He laughed once, quietly. “I almost did.”

“I remember.”

He ran his thumb along the rope where it was worn smooth. “You never took it down.”

“No.”

“Why not?”