The Top Tier I Sent My Niece

The Morning Of

The second Saturday in June came up hot and clear, the kind of morning where the dew burns off by eight and the corn is loud with it.

I got dressed at the church in the little room off the fellowship hall where they keep the choir robes.

My maid of honor was Becca from the clinic, who I have known since the fourth grade, and she did up the back of my dress and she did not say a word about the empty space where my mother should have been fussing with my veil.

My mother had, in the end, offered me her veil.

She drove it over to the clinic two days before, in a grocery sack, and handed it to me in the parking lot and said she hoped I would wear it and that she was sorry about the day but that family was family and she hoped someday I would have children and understand.

I wore the veil. I want you to know that.

I wore my mother’s veil to the wedding my mother did not attend, because it was good lace and it was the only thing of hers I was going to get that day, and because I am not built to throw a kindness back in a person’s face even when the kindness is the cheap kind that costs the giver nothing.

Becca pinned it in.

“You look like a painting,” she said, and her chin did the thing it does, and I told her if she cried I would cry and we had thirty minutes.

At a quarter to four Seth’s mother came back to the little room, this big soft woman I had met six times, and she took both my hands and she said, “I know who isn’t here.

I want you to know that from here on out you’ve got a mother in the second row, and she’s going to be looking at you like you hung the moon, because to my boy you did.”

That is the first time I cried that day. Not at the empty tables.

At Seth’s mother in the choir room telling me I could borrow her the way I had borrowed the veil.

My father was supposed to walk me down the aisle.