The Morning I Paid My Father Back

Getting ready

Bethel Church is a white frame church with a bell tower and a gravel lot, set in the middle of soybean fields. My great grandparents were married there. So were Grandpa Harold and my grandmother, who died when I was six.

The bride’s room is a Sunday school room in the basement with a mirror propped against the chalkboard. Tyler’s mother Donna was already down there with a box of bobby pins and a steamer for my dress. She had raised four boys on a hog farm and was not afraid of anything.

“Well?” Donna said when I came in.

“It’s done.”

She did not ask what I meant. Tyler had told her. She came over and took the rollers out one at a time, gently, setting each one in a shoe box.

“I’m proud of you,” she said quietly. “I want you to know that. And Tyler is too. He’s been pacing the parking lot since nine.”

“He’s not supposed to see me.”

“He’s not looking. He’s walking in circles behind the fellowship hall like a dog waiting on a storm.”

I laughed for the first time all morning.

My dress was simple, ivory satin with lace at the shoulders. I had found it at a bridal shop in Fort Wayne for eleven hundred and fifty dollars, marked down from a lot more, because it had been tried on so many times. I loved it more than anything I had ever owned.

My mother did my veil. Amber touched up my curls. At ten thirty, Grandpa Harold knocked on the door with the head of his cane.

He was in his brown Sunday suit, the one he had worn to every wedding and funeral for twenty years. He had a boutonniere pinned crooked on his lapel. Donna fixed it without a word.

He stood in the doorway and looked at me for a long time.

“Your grandmother would have liked that dress,” he said.

That was almost the end of my mascara.