The Thirty Feet to the Altar

“I knew it was wrong by the time I got home that day.” She looked at me. “I didn’t know how to take it back. I’m fifty six years old and I didn’t know how to call a man and say I was sorry.”

I’ve been asked since if I was angry at her right then, at that table. I have thought about it. The honest answer is that I’d been angry in January, and somewhere around the parallel bars in May I’d stopped. It’s hard to stay mad at a woman who gave you the best reason you ever had to get out of a chair.

“Sheila,” I said. “You’re going to be my grandkids’ grandma. I’d like us to be able to sit at the same table.”

She nodded. She was crying too hard to talk.

“There’s one more thing,” I said. “You owe Hannah an apology. Not me. Her. She’s the one you put in the middle.”

“I know,” Sheila said. “I’m going to do it tonight. I’ll do it in front of Jake.”

And she did. I watched her cross the barn to where Hannah was standing with her bridesmaids by the cake. I watched her take both of Hannah’s hands, and I watched my daughter listen, and I watched my daughter put her arms around that woman. Hannah has always been a better person than me.

The picture

Sheila did one more thing that night, and I didn’t find out about it until October.

She went and found the photographer, a young woman from Monticello named Kim, and asked her which shots she’d gotten of the aisle. Kim had gotten a lot of them.

The one she showed Sheila on the back of her camera was taken from the front, just as Jake reached us. You can see my two canes and my left leg bent wrong and Jake’s hand under my elbow and Hannah’s face, with her mouth open, and the empty wheelchair behind us all in the barn door, with the light coming through.

“That one,” Sheila told her. “Print that one the biggest of all. Bigger than anything in the package. I’ll pay for it myself.”

Kim printed it twenty four by thirty six inches, on canvas. It cost Sheila four hundred and twelve dollars. Sheila drove it out to our farm herself the second week of October, in the back of her Lexus with the seats folded down, and carried it up to our porch.

“I wanted the first big picture of this wedding to hang in your house,” she said. “Not mine.”

It’s in our front room now, over the couch. Karen says it’s too big for the wall. She has never once tried to move it.

Sheila ordered a second, smaller one for herself. Jake told me it hangs in her front hall in Mahomet, by the door, where every client she brings home for coffee walks right past it. Jake says people ask her about it. Jake says she tells them the whole thing, kitchen and all, and doesn’t leave out her part.