The Thirty Feet to the Altar

What Sheila did

I didn’t look at Sheila Brenner during the vows. I didn’t look at her at all. I want to be honest about that. I wasn’t sure what I’d see, and I didn’t want to see it on Hannah’s day.

So I didn’t see what Karen saw, which she told me about that night.

When I stood up at the barn door, Karen said, Sheila lowered her phone and put it down on her chair, face down.

When my left leg started to shake at the crack, Sheila stepped out of her row into the aisle, like she meant to come to me herself. She had both hands over her mouth. Then Jake got there first, and she stood right there at the end of the front row and did not move until we passed her.

At the reception, after the meal, Sheila found me at the end of the head table. I was back in my own chair by then. She pulled a folding chair over and sat down close, so she was level with me. Her eye makeup had run, and she hadn’t fixed it.

“Roger,” she said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure.”

She looked down at her hands for a long time. Out on the floor the DJ was playing an old Alabama song and Dale was dancing with Aunt Lois.

“My dad drank,” Sheila said. “My whole life. He was sober for my wedding, or he told my mother he was.

“He walked me down the aisle at St. Pat’s in Rantoul in 1991, and about two thirds of the way he fell. He went down sideways into the end of a pew and took the candle stand with him. There’s a picture of it. The photographer took it. My mother kept it in the album.”

I didn’t say anything. I let her talk.

“I’ve spent thirty years making sure every picture is perfect,” she said. “Every Christmas card. Every listing I’ve ever sold. Jake’s graduation.

“And when I saw that wheelchair in the kitchen, I didn’t see you. I saw that day. I saw that aisle. I saw everybody looking at my father on the floor.”

She pressed a napkin under her eyes. “That isn’t an excuse. It’s just what was in my head. I said an awful thing to your daughter in your own kitchen, and you thanked me for it. I’ve thought about that every day since January.”

“Jake told me you knew it was wrong by June,” I said.