The Wedding Day We Spent on the Dock

The dance

Up at the truck, the radio was playing the country station out of Bemidji. I do not remember the song. It was something slow and old, with a steel guitar in it.

Megan set her shoes down on the dock next to mine.

Then she took Dan’s hand and put her other hand on his shoulder, and she stepped up onto his feet, the way she did when she was eight.

Barefoot, in her wedding dress, onto the brown dress shoes he had polished that morning.

He laughed. It came out of him like a sob.

And then he put his hand on her back and they danced, slow, at the end of that dock, in the blue light, with the fire smoke drifting over them and the loons calling out on the water.

I picked up my phone and took a picture. It was the only thing I could think to do.

My hands were shaking. I took four, and three of them are blurry, and one of them is not.

When the song ended, Megan stepped off his feet and put her arms around his neck and held on, and Dan held her the way he held her when she had croup at six, with his whole body, like he could keep anything bad from getting to her.

What she said to me

After a while, Megan let go of him and turned to me. I was still sitting on the boards. I had not gotten up. I did not trust my legs.

She sat down next to me in that dress, right on the dock, and the gray dust got all over the skirt and she did not care. She put her head on my shoulder.

“I was so mad at you,” she said. “All day. Standing up there and looking at that empty spot. I wanted you there so bad, Mom. I wanted you to see me.”

“I know,” I said. “I wanted to see you too. I’ll never get to. I know that.”

“Then why?” she said. Not angry. Just asking.

“Because I couldn’t sit in his place,” I said. “And I couldn’t sit beside it empty. I tried, honey. I’m not saying I was right. I’m saying I couldn’t.”

She wiped her eyes. “I danced with Tyler and the whole time I was thinking about Dad on this dock. Putting worms on my hook. I couldn’t stand it. I told Tyler, I have to go. He didn’t even ask where. He just got the keys.”

The rest of that night

An hour later they drove the forty minutes back to the Legion hall.

Megan said the band was booked till midnight and she was not going to waste the deposit. Dan laughed at that, really laughed, for the first time all day.

Kris told me later that when Megan walked back into the reception with her hair down and her dress filthy, the whole room went quiet.

Then Megan went up to the band and said something, and the band played the song from Brainerd, the one from when she was eight.

She danced to it alone in the middle of the floor. Kris said half the room was crying, and most of them did not even know why.