The Wedding Day We Spent on the Dock

The man who raised her

Rob Kessler and I got married at twenty-one in the Lutheran church in town.

He was funny and he could fix anything with an engine in it, and he drank. Not every night at first. Then every night. Then in the mornings too.

He left when Megan was three. There was no big fight.

He just went to work at the grain elevator one Tuesday in October and did not come home, and a week later I got a call from his brother saying he was in Fargo and was not coming back.

Dan Sorensen was a mechanic for the county highway department, five years older than me, quiet, with a mustache he has had his whole adult life.

He came into the school office to drop off a form for his nephew and stood at the counter turning his cap around in his hands.

He asked me out three times before I said yes.

On our second date he met Megan, who was four and suspicious of everybody, and she threw a plastic horse at his head.

He caught it and asked her what its name was.

We got married when she was four and a half, in my mother’s backyard, with twenty people and a sheet cake from the grocery store.

Megan wore a yellow dress and refused to stand still for any picture that did not have the plastic horse in it.

Dan never once asked her to call him Dad.

She started on her own when she was six, after he sat up all night with her when she had croup, steaming up the bathroom and singing old Johnny Cash songs badly because they were the only songs he knew all the way through.

Rob called maybe four times in the next ten years. Twice on her birthday, a day or two late. Once drunk at Christmas.

Once to ask if I still had his deer rifle. I told him I had sold it to pay for her braces, which was true.

The dock

Dan’s grandfather built the cabin on Pine Lake in 1961.

It is forty minutes north of town, past the turnoff for the Bible camp, a brown-shingled cabin with one bedroom, a porch with a sagging screen, and an outhouse we did not replace until 2009.

It is not a lake place the way people in the Cities mean it. There is no boathouse.

Straight across the bay is the Olsons’ little green cabin, which is older than ours.

There is a dock Dan rebuilds a section of every spring, a fourteen-foot boat with a nine-horse motor, and a fire ring made out of rocks his grandfather hauled up from the shore.

The first summer we were married, Dan took Megan to the end of that dock with a little pink rod from the hardware store. She was five.

She would not touch a worm, so he baited every hook for her, and she held the rod with both fists like it might get away.

She caught a sunfish the size of her palm that first morning, and she screamed so loud that the people across the lake waved at us.

Dan took it off the hook and let her pet it with one finger before she let it go.

He did that for years. Every hook, every worm, every summer, until she was eleven and announced she could do it herself and then did it, gagging, to prove it.

He stood behind her with his arms crossed and acted like he was not proud.

When she was eight, we went to my cousin’s wedding in Brainerd.

There was a dance with fathers and daughters, and Dan did not get up because he was not sure if he was allowed.

Megan came and pulled him out of his chair by his tie.

They danced to an old country song, her feet on top of his good shoes.

When it was over she looked up at him and said, very seriously, “When I get married, you have to dance with me first. Before anybody. Promise.”

He promised. I have it on video somewhere, on a tape we cannot play anymore. I don’t need the tape. I can still see his face.