The Thirty Feet to the Altar

Keeping Hannah out of it

Hannah was crying by then, the quiet kind. She sat down beside me and put her forehead on my shoulder the way she did when she was nine and her calf lost at the county fair.

“Daddy, I’m not doing it,” she said. “I’m not having Uncle Dale walk me. I don’t care about the pictures. I’ll tell her.”

“No,” I said. “You won’t tell her anything.”

She lifted her head. “What?”

“Listen to me. You’re marrying Jake. You’re going to be at that woman’s Thanksgiving table for the next forty years. I’m not having you start that with a fight over me.” I wiped her face with my thumb. “This is between me and Sheila. You stay out of it. Can you do that?”

“But what do I tell her?”

“Tell her your dad is handling the aisle and she doesn’t need to worry about it. That’s all. And tell Dale he doesn’t need to rent a suit for that part.”

Hannah looked at me a long time. “You’re still walking me, though. Right? I mean, rolling. You know what I mean.”

“I’ll be at the barn door,” I said. “I promise you that.”

That was the only promise I made her. I didn’t tell her what I was thinking, because I didn’t know yet if I could do it, and I’d rather disappoint myself than her.

“What about Jake?” Karen said, after Hannah had gone. “Does Jake know what his mother said?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “And I don’t want him finding out from us. He’s a good kid. He’s going to have to live with her.”

Jake Brenner was twenty eight and worked as a lineman for the electric co-op out of Paxton.

He was the kind of young man who noticed when your yard light was flickering and showed up on Saturday with a bucket truck. When I’d had my accident, he and Hannah had only been dating a few months, and he’d spent two weekends that fall building a ramp to our back door with his own lumber.

I was not going to put that boy between his mother and his bride.