The Wedding Day We Spent on the Dock

Why I did not go

People have asked me why I did not just go and sit quietly and smile, and then go home to him.

The honest answer is that I tried to picture it, and I could not. Me in the front pew on the bride’s side, where the mother sits.

And beside me, the spot where Dan would be. Empty. Or worse, filled by somebody’s aunt.

Every time I pictured it, my chest closed up like a fist. I could not breathe in the picture.

I knew I would sit there and cry the whole time, and not the good kind, and everyone would see it in the photographs for the rest of her life.

That is not a noble reason. I know that. It is a reason about me.

My sister Kris said exactly that, and she was right that it was about me. I just did not think it was only about me.

Because there was another part. Twenty-three years ago, I married a man who took my daughter as his own without being asked.

I stood in my mother’s backyard and promised to stand with him. I did not see how I stood with him by sitting in his empty place.

Kris said I could at least go to the reception, where there was no pew and no empty place. Megan had asked Dan to come to that. I do not have a clean answer for why I did not go to the Legion. I just stayed with him.

So I told Megan, two weeks before the wedding, at the same kitchen table. I did it as gently as I knew how.

I said I loved her, that I was not angry, and that I would not be there.

She went white. “Mom,” she said. “You’re punishing me.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m staying with your dad. That’s all. I can’t sit in that pew with his place empty, honey. I’ve tried. I can’t do it.”

“He told you to go,” she said. “He told me he told you to go.”

“He did,” I said. “And I’m not going.”

She left without hugging me. That was the first time in her whole life she had left my house without a hug.

I stood at the window and watched her taillights go down the street and thought about her, little, standing at that same window watching trucks.

What it cost

My sister Kris did not speak to me for nine days.

Then she called and said, “Dan told you to go. So I’ll go for both of us. And I’ll send you pictures, because someone has to, and you’re going to want them whether you think so or not.”

Our pastor’s wife caught me in the church parking lot the Sunday before. She is a kind woman.

She took my hand and said, “Jill, you’ll regret this. I’ve been a pastor’s wife for thirty years. Mothers who miss it always regret it.”

I said, “I know I will.”

Tyler came by the school office on a Thursday, still in his co-op shirt, with his hard hat on the seat of the truck.

He stood at the counter the way Dan did twenty-three years ago and said, “Mrs. Sorensen, I don’t think this is right. Any of it. For what it’s worth.”

“Which part?” I said.

“All of it,” he said. “Her asking him. You not coming. I told her I don’t like it. She cried. I’m not going to make her cry again two weeks before the wedding.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “I just wanted you to know where I stand.”