The Bouquet My Sister Handed Back

Your Call, Meg

Ryan leaned down so his mouth was close to my ear. The song was still going.

Josh, the DJ, a nice kid from Volga who had played at half the weddings in the county, was looking at us with his hands up like he did not know what to do.

“Your call, Meg,” Ryan said. “Whatever you want. I’m right behind you.”

He meant it. I knew he meant it because his hand had not moved off my back. If I had walked out to the gravel lot and climbed into the truck, he would have come with me.

If I had gone and stood in front of the cake and cried, he would have stood there beside me and let me cry.

Ryan is not a man who makes speeches.

He is a man who shows up at three in the morning when your power is out, and fixes it, and does not wait around to be thanked. That is who I married.

I could have cried. I came very close.

I could feel it starting in the back of my throat, the way it does when you are a little girl and you have been holding it in at the supper table.

I could have said something sharp. I had a few things ready. Twenty-nine years of being Kelsey’s big sister will load you up with sharp things.

But I looked over at that table, and I saw Ryan’s grandma.

Dorothy is 88. She lives in the same farmhouse outside Lake Preston she moved into as a bride, and she does not get out much anymore. Her hips are bad and her eyes are worse.

Her daughter had driven her two hours that morning just so she could sit at the edge of the floor and see her oldest grandson dance with his wife.

She had told me that at the rehearsal supper. She had held my hand with her soft, cold fingers and said, “I’ll be right up front for the dancing, honey. I don’t want to miss it.”

Now she was sitting right behind Tanner. All she could see of our first dance was the back of his gray suit coat and the bottom of his shoes.

Something in me settled when I saw that. It was not anger. It was more like a decision coming in quiet, the way snow does.

I picked up my skirt with one hand, and I let go of Ryan’s hand with the other, and I walked across the floor toward my sister.