The Tractor at the Church Door

She wiped her eyes with the side of her finger, careful of her makeup. “They called me country for ten years after that. In front of me. At Christmas. I never once stopped hearing it.”

“Oh, Susan,” Joan said. She’d come up beside the tractor too.

“I didn’t want that for Katie,” Susan said. “That’s the truth. I thought I was saving her from it. I thought if the pictures were nice, nobody could ever say anything to her. I thought I was protecting her.”

She looked up at Katie on the fender. “And I made it worse. I did the same thing to you that they did to me. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

Katie leaned down off the fender and put her hand on Susan’s cheek. “You didn’t know,” she said. “I should have told you why. I just told you it was cute. I never told you about Mom.”

Susan looked at Joan. Joan said, “June of 1987. Same church. I held my veil in my lap the whole way home so it wouldn’t end up in the beans.”

Susan laughed. It came out of her all at once, wet and surprised. “In your lap,” she said.

“In my lap,” Joan said.

The picture

Susan looked at the photographer on the sidewalk, and then she held out her hand to her. “May I?”

The photographer gave her the camera. I don’t think she was supposed to, but she did.

Susan stepped back from the tractor, out into the middle of the gravel, until she could get all of us in the frame, and the church behind us, and the steps full of people.

“Katie,” she said. “Take your veil off.”

Katie looked at her. Then she understood, and she reached up and pulled the pins out of her veil, and folded it, and set it down in her lap, and put both hands on it.

“Wayne,” Susan said. “Look at your daughter.”

I looked at my daughter. She was sitting on my father’s tractor, on the left fender, in her lace dress, with her veil in her lap, just like the picture in our hallway.

Her husband was standing behind me on the drawbar with his hand on my shoulder, the way my father used to stand behind me.

I don’t know what my face did. I heard the shutter go about ten times.

Then Susan lowered the camera and looked at the screen, and she put her hand over her mouth, and she laughed again, and this time it was a happy laugh.

“Oh, that’s the one,” she said. “That’s the one they’ll want in fifty years.”

She gave the camera back to the photographer. Then she went over to the Chevrolet and spoke to the driver for a minute.

I couldn’t hear what she said. He nodded and touched his cap.