The Bride Who Ended Up in My Chair

Kendra looked at herself for a long moment. She reached up very slowly and touched the loose piece by her cheek, and then the lavender, so lightly I don’t think she moved it at all.

“That’s me,” she said. “That looks like me.”

Then she cried again, harder than before, the kind that comes up from somewhere a long way down. Every bit of mascara she had put on that morning ran down her face in two gray lines.

Linda made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob. Megan said, “Oh no, her makeup,” and then started crying herself.

“It’s fine,” I said. “This is why I brought the kit.”

I got a warm washcloth from the sink and cleaned her face off gently, from her forehead down, the way you would wash a little girl’s face. She closed her eyes and let me.

Her shoulders came all the way down for the first time since I had walked in.

Then I did her makeup again from the start. Soft. A warm brown on her eyes instead of black liner, a little blush high on her cheeks, and waterproof mascara, because I have done brides for nine years.

“No more crying,” I told her, “until Brandon sees you. Then you can cry all you want.”

“No promises,” she said.

At eleven fifty-six, I unplugged the last curling iron. Linda read the time off the stove clock out loud, like a referee. The girls cheered, right there in that farm kitchen, with donut sugar on their robes.

I packed up while they ate the sandwiches Linda had made. Kendra came out of her mother’s room in her gown just as I zipped my last bag, walked straight across the kitchen, and hugged me hard.

“I don’t know how to pay you back for this,” she said.

“You’re marrying my brother,” I said. “Be good to him. That’s payment enough.”

“I will,” she said. “And Brooke. Will you sit with me while Mom does my buttons? There are forty of them. I don’t want you to go yet.”

So I sat on the edge of Linda’s bed in my smock while Linda did forty little satin buttons up Kendra’s back with her hands shaking, and Kendra held my hand the whole time.

I drove back to town behind the bridesmaids’ cars in a slow little parade. The ice had stopped, the sun had come out, and every tree and fence and power line in western Nebraska was shining.

I changed into my green dress in the church basement bathroom. There was no time for my own hair, so I brushed the ponytail out and put it right back up.

My mother found me there and asked where in the world I had been all morning. “Doing the bride,” I said.

She looked at me a long time. Then she put her hand on my cheek. “Your grandma would be so proud of you,” she said, and that was the only time all day I came close to losing my makeup.

The church was about two-thirds full. Kendra’s relatives from Colorado were stuck behind the closed interstate, and so was the DJ, but everybody from town came, because it was Brandon, and because my dad had sanded every street they needed.

Brandon stood at the front in a dark suit, rocking a little on his heels the way he has since he was a boy. When the doors opened and Kendra came through on Linda’s arm, his face did something I will remember the rest of my life.