The Wedding Day We Spent on the Dock

The night before

The night before the wedding, at half past nine, my phone rang. It was Megan. I could hear the rehearsal dinner winding down behind her, dishes and laughing.

“Mom,” she said, in a voice I had not heard since she was small. “Who’s going to button my dress? There are thirty buttons up the back. You always said you’d do them.”

I stood in the kitchen with the phone and could not think of one useful thing to say. I said Kris could help, or her grandma. I said I loved her.

“Okay,” she said, very small, and hung up. I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cupboard, and Dan found me there an hour later.

The morning of

The Saturday came hot and bright, the way June is up north when it finally decides to be summer.

I woke at five and lay there listening to the robins and thinking, in nine hours, my only child is getting married and I will not be there.

Dan was already up. I found him in the kitchen in his undershirt, ironing his new white dress shirt on a towel on the table.

I stood in the doorway in my robe and did not say anything.

“Thought we’d wear the clothes,” he said, without looking up. “We bought them. Seems a waste not to.”

“Where are we wearing them to?”

“The lake,” he said. “If that’s all right with you. I don’t want to sit in this house all day listening for the church bells.”

It was more than all right. I went and put on the navy dress, the sleeveless one, with the navy heels I had bought to match.

I put on the earrings my mother gave me. I carried my heels in my hand because I knew I would not wear them on the dock.

Dan put on the shirt and the tie I had picked out, a plain dark navy one.

He did not put on the suit coat, but he put on his brown dress shoes and polished them first.

He loaded the rods in the truck and the tackle box and a cooler with egg salad sandwiches and two cans of root beer.

On the dock

We sat right on the end of the dock, on the boards, with our feet hanging over the water. I took off my heels and set them beside me on the boards.

Dan kept his shoes on. He said a man in a tie does not go barefoot, and his good shoes hung there over the water.

He baited my hook without asking. Just reached over and took the rod out of my hand and threaded a worm on it and handed it back, the way he did for her every summer until she was eleven.

I had to look away from him for a while after that.

At noon Kris texted: “Grandma buttoned it. Took her twenty minutes with her arthritis. Megan cried and had to redo her mascara.”

I read that text more times than any of the others. I am her mother, and my mother buttoned her wedding dress because I was on a dock forty minutes away.

At a quarter to two, my phone buzzed. It was Kris. She had sent a picture of the inside of the church, taken from the back.

And the front pew on the bride’s side. My mother sat on the aisle end.

Then my aunt Jean. Then one empty spot, right in the middle, where the mother of the bride sits.

Kris wrote: “They left your spot open. Nobody would sit in it. I tried to make Aunt Jean move over and she wouldn’t.”

I showed it to Dan. He looked at it for a long time, holding the phone out at arm’s length the way he does because he will not wear his readers in public.

“Well,” he said. “That’s a nice church.”