The Letter My Grandfather Read
The week of the wedding, the church women came with dishes and theories, and four times I picked up my phone to call my mother and set it face down again. Then I put on my dress. It was ivory, plain, tea length, with a little cap sleeve. I found it on the clearance rack in Sedalia and it needed nothing but a hem. It cost $240, and it was mine, not a hand-me-down. When I put it on in the dressing room and turned around, a stranger in the mirror looked back with a face I recognized.
She looked like someone who had been asked to stay.
October 11th came up bright and cold, frost on the pumpkins and the soybean fields cut down to gold stubble. I dressed at the church, in the little room off the sanctuary where the choir robes hang. At ten minutes to two there was a knock, and I said, “Come in,” and it was my grandfather.
He was wearing the gray suit from my grandmother’s funeral, pressed so hard the creases looked drawn with a ruler. His shoes shone. A little nick showed on his neck where the barber’s razor had slipped.
“Well,” he said, and stopped just inside the door.
His mouth worked once. He put his hand to his chest and breathed in, and I understood that my eighty-four-year-old grandfather was trying not to come apart.
“Grandpa.”
“I’m all right.” He cleared his throat. “She would have liked that dress. Nell had a way of picking the plain one and being right about it.” He held out his elbow. “I understand you could use somebody to walk you.”
I took his arm. It was shaking, a fine steady tremor all the way down to his wrist.
“Are you nervous?”
“Terrified,” said my grandfather. “I haven’t walked a girl down an aisle since your mother, and I don’t remember doing it well.”
“Don’t let go of me,” I said. It came out smaller than I meant. “I mean it.”
My grandfather covered my hand with his, and looked down at me with his wet, clear blue eyes.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “I’ve had you since the day you were born.”
Then the doors opened, and the whole church was on its feet.
When Pastor Don asked who gave this woman, my grandfather said, “Her grandmother and I do,” and the whole church made a small sound.
The front pew on the bride’s side had an empty space in it. Nobody had told the ushers to leave it. They just had.
The Grange hall that afternoon was everything I’d dreamed.
The big doors stood wide open to the field. Doris and her ladies had strung white lights through the rafters and set mason jars of asters on every table, and Hank Dobbins’s brisket smoked in a trailer out back. Mark and his linemen had spent Friday night hauling folding tables out of the Grange storeroom and taping down extension cords, and he had done it without once mentioning that it was the night before his own wedding.
A hundred and twelve people, by the guest book. Neighbors. The church women. Half the clinic staff, and a handful of the farmers whose cows I’d pulled calves from at three in the morning. Two of Mark’s linemen in clean shirts, looking uncomfortable. Mark’s grandmother in a wheelchair with a lap quilt, ninety-one and sharp as a tack.
And at a back table, my sister.