The Wedding Day We Spent on the Dock

The vows

At two o’clock exactly, Kris sent a picture of Rob walking Megan down the aisle.

He was in a rented black suit that was a little big in the shoulders. His hair was gray now, all of it.

His hand was on her arm and I could see, even in a phone picture, that it was shaking.

Megan was looking straight ahead. She was so beautiful I could not stand it.

I made a sound I did not know I could make. Dan put his arm around me and did not say anything.

Then, at 2:11, Kris texted: “They’re saying the vows. Pastor’s voice is cracking. Tyler’s crying. She’s holding it together. Barely.”

I missed my only daughter’s vows.

I want to write that sentence down plainly and leave it there, because I will never get them back.

There is a video somewhere, and I have watched it, and it is not the same.

I was not in the room. That is the true cost of what I did, and I chose it.

I held the phone in my lap and cried on the end of the dock in my navy dress, and Dan held my shoulder with one hand and his fishing rod with the other, and neither of us said one word for a long time.

The program

Kris had slipped me an extra program the week before, and I had brought it along.

Around one, I opened it to the order of service and laid it on the boards between Dan and me, open, with the hymns and the names facing up at the sky.

It lay there all afternoon. The breeze came up a little at three and lifted a page and set it back down.

Dan reached over once and smoothed it flat with two fingers, gentle, like it might bruise.

Later, from the Legion hall, a picture of the family table. The place cards. My name. Dan’s name. Two empty chairs, side by side.

Kris wrote: “Everyone knows. Nobody’s saying it, but everyone knows. Some people are mad at you. Some people are mad at Rob. Your pastor’s wife cried.”

The long afternoon

We caught nine sunfish and two little perch and let every one of them go. Dan does not keep fish under eight inches.

A pontoon boat went by around five with an older couple in it, and the man lifted his can in our direction and called out, “Somebody get married?”

Dan lifted his hand and called back, “Our daughter,” and the man said, “Well, congratulations,” and the boat went on around the point.

I watched Dan’s face, and it did not change at all, and that is when I knew how much it was costing him.

“You can go,” Dan said quietly. “Right now. It’s forty minutes. You’d make the dancing. She’d be glad to see you, Jill. I know she would.”

“I’m where I’m supposed to be,” I said.

He looked at me a long time. Then he nodded and reached over and fixed the collar of my dress, which had folded under in the back.

That was all. But I knew he was glad I was there, even though he had spent two months telling me to go.