The Top Tier I Sent My Niece

How the Day Got Picked

Seth and I set the date in February, on a Sunday, at my parents’ kitchen table with the calendar from the feed store open between the coffee cups.

The second Saturday in June.

I remember my mother ran her finger down the little box and said June was a pretty month for it, and my father said as long as it was after planting he did not care, and that was the blessing, such as it was.

I was twenty-nine. I had waited, by the standards of the women I grew up with, a long time.

I had watched my sister April marry at twenty-two and I had held her babies and I had been the aunt who drove two hours for every birthday, and I had told myself my turn would feel bigger for the waiting.

Seth works at the co-op and I keep the books for the vet clinic in town. We are not people with money.

We paid for the wedding ourselves out of a coffee can and a savings account, and we kept it small on purpose, the fellowship hall at the church, Darlene’s cake, a potluck of sides to go with the ham my uncle smoked.

The eighth-grade graduation came up in April. My sister called me, bright as a new dime, to say that Kaylee’s promotion ceremony had landed on the second Saturday in June.

“Isn’t that funny,” she said. “Same day as yours.”

“Same day,” I said. “What time.”

“Two o’clock. At the school.”

My wedding was at four, at the church, eleven minutes from the school by the county road. I did the arithmetic out loud so she could hear me do it.

Ceremony at two, done by three, a person could stand in the gym and clap for Kaylee and still be in a pew by four with time to find the restroom first.

“Oh, sure,” April said. “We’ll figure it out.”

I believed her. That is the part I am ashamed of, looking back, not anything I did but how long I kept believing her.

The Kind of Family We Are

I should tell you something about Kaylee so you do not picture a brat, because she is not one, and none of this is her doing.

Kaylee is my sister’s oldest, fourteen that spring, all elbows and braces and a laugh that comes out of her like a hiccup.

She had been mine, in a way, since she was born. I taught her to ride a bike in my parents’ driveway.

I was the one who came and sat with her the night April and her husband had their worst fight, the one that nearly ended things, and I read her the whole of a horse book in a blanket fort until she slept.

So when I say my family chose Kaylee’s eighth-grade graduation over my wedding, I am not saying Kaylee did anything but be a kid who got promoted out of middle school, which every kid in the county does every single June.