The Day Dad Gave Me Away

She pinned it on the lapel of his dark suit, the one he’d bought for my mother’s funeral and worn to every funeral and wedding since.

“Gene, you look like a movie star,” she told him. Dad laughed, a real laugh, and said something that might have been “liar.”

Connie had come down the stairs in a sage green dress I’d never seen before. Her gray bob was done just so, curled under at the ends.

She looked nice. I told her so, and she looked surprised, and said thank you, and then went to find her purse.

We drove out to the church in two cars. Me and Kim in the front of Kim’s car, my dress filling the whole back seat.

Dad and Connie in the gray van. When we pulled into the gravel lot it was already full of pickups and cars parked along the ditch out to the road.

The church is small and white, with a steeple that leans the slightest bit to the east from a hundred and twenty years of wind.

Inside there’s no stained glass, only plain windows, and on a September afternoon the light comes through them yellow and clean and lays itself across the pews.

The pews are wooden, dark with age, and they hold about a hundred and sixty people if everyone’s friendly. That day, every seat was full.

Jake’s whole family. Half the clinic. The men from the elevator in their good shirts. Old farmers who had known my dad since he was a boy.

Connie went in ahead of us and took her seat in the front pew on the left side, where the bride’s family sits.

I watched her through the crack in the door. She sat very straight, her purse on her lap, looking forward at the altar.

Then it was just Dad and me in the entryway. Kim fussed with my veil one last time and slipped in through the side. The organist finished one song and paused.

I knelt down in my white dress on the old linoleum and fixed the sprig of wheat on his lapel, which had come a little crooked.

“You ready?” I asked him.

He looked at me for a long time. His eyes were wet. He lifted his good hand and touched my cheek, very lightly, the way he used to when I was small and had a fever.

“Ready,” he said. Clear. The whole word.

The organ started. The doors opened. And nearly every person in that church stood up.

I’d seen it a hundred times at other people’s weddings, the whole room rising when the bride comes in. I didn’t know how it would feel. It felt like a wave going through me.

I put my right hand on the push handle of the wheelchair. With my left I reached down to the armrest, and his left hand was already there, waiting. He took my hand and held it.

We started down the aisle.

I’d practiced pushing the chair in Connie’s living room, but carpet is different from old wood floors, and a living room is different from a church full of standing people.

I went slow. The wheels made a soft sound over the boards.