The Thirty Feet to the Altar

Practicing on the crack

In August, Mandy drove out to the farm on her day off.

She wanted to see the floor. She walked the whole length of it with her hands on her hips, from the big sliding door to the spot where Karen had already marked the altar with a strip of blue painter’s tape. She knelt by the crack in my grandfather’s concrete and put her finger in it.

“Okay,” she said. “We step over that with the right foot. Every time. You hear me? Not the left. The right.”

So every evening after supper that August, Karen pushed me out to the barn. I’d stand up at the door with the canes, and she’d walk backward in front of me the way Mandy did. We’d go as far as I could go, and then she’d bring the chair.

The first week I made it eight feet. The second week fourteen. Then twenty one. Hannah was living in town and working with her classroom getting ready for school, and she came out on Sundays for dinner. We kept the barn door shut on Sundays.

“What are you two doing out there all the time?” she asked once.

“Setting up for the wedding,” Karen said, and that was true enough.

Jake came out one evening in late August with the bucket truck to hang the string lights from the rafters. He was up in the bucket, sixty feet of lights over his shoulder, when he looked down and saw me standing in the middle of the barn floor on two canes.

He stopped with the light string hanging off his arm. He didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then he lowered the bucket, got out, and came and stood in front of me.

“Hannah doesn’t know,” he said. It was not a question.

“No,” I said. “And I’d appreciate it if she didn’t.”

“Does my mom know?”

“No.”

Jake looked at the canes, and at my legs, and at the blue tape on the floor up at the front. He was a lineman. He knew what thirty feet looked like.

“Mom told me what she said to Hannah,” he said quietly. “In June. Hannah never told me. Mom told me herself, like it was nothing. Like she’d fixed a problem. I told her she had to call you and take it back.”

“Did she?”

“She said she’d think about it.” He shook his head. “Roger, I’m sorry. I should have come out here right then.”

“You came out here now,” I said. “Help me get back to the chair, would you? My left leg’s about done.”

He put his arm under mine without making a thing of it, the way you’d help any man step down off a hay wagon.

The morning of

The wedding was the third Saturday in September. The beans were turning but not ready, and the corn was standing dry and brown in the fields around the barn. We had a hundred and sixty white chairs set up in rows on the barn floor with an aisle down the middle, and hay bales along the walls, and Jake’s string lights crossing back and forth over the whole thing.

I put on my gray suit at two o’clock. Karen had taken the pants to a woman in Tuscola to let them out at the ankle, so the braces would fit under them without showing.

Dale came in and helped me with my tie, because my hands were shaking.

“You eat anything?” he asked.

“Couldn’t.”

“Eat a cracker.” He handed me a sleeve of saltines from his suit pocket. “You fall over from no breakfast, Mandy’ll kill us both.”

Mandy texted me at three. Back row, left side. Right foot over the crack. You’ve got this, farmer.

The ceremony was at five thirty. At five fifteen Dale wheeled me down the gravel lane to the barn and parked me just outside the big sliding door, where the guests couldn’t see. He hooked the two canes over the back of my chair.

Hannah came across the yard from the house a few minutes later with Karen and her bridesmaids. She was in her mother’s dress, altered, with her grandmother’s pearls. She looked so much like Karen at twenty three that I couldn’t speak at all.

She knelt down in all that white so she was level with me.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said.

“Hi, baby.”

“You ready to roll?” She smiled. “I’ll go slow.”

I looked at Karen over Hannah’s head, and Karen nodded at me once.

“Hannah,” I said. “I need you to do something for me. When the music starts, don’t look at me. Just look at Jake. And when I tell you, take my arm.”

“Your arm?”

“My arm,” I said.