Forty Chairs Under the Cottonwood

“Forty,” she said.

“Forty,” I said. “Exactly what you ordered.”

She looked at the rows for a while with her hands on her hips.

Then she went into the house and came out with three little cards she had written that morning, and she set them on the front row, on the left side.

One said Dad. One said Mom. One said Grandma Bonnie.

People started coming up the lane at half past three. Josh’s folks from Brandon. His grandpa Walt, with his oxygen tank on a little cart.

The nurses from Emily’s floor. My old line crew foreman and his wife. The neighbors from both sides. Our pastor from the Lutheran church in Egan.

Josh’s aunt had the food going in the garage on two folding tables: shredded beef sandwiches, a potato salad, baked beans with bacon, and four pans of kuchen, peach and rhubarb, because you cannot have a South Dakota wedding without kuchen.

Kyle set up his speakers by the barn. The cooler sat in the shade with the wine on ice.

A couple of the young nurses had tied little white ribbons on the ends of the rows, which I had not thought of and would not have thought of if I lived to be a hundred.

By ten minutes to four, every chair was full except three. Mine, because I was going to walk her. And the two beside mine.

They sat empty in the front row with the sun on them, and everybody tried not to look at them, and everybody did.

I kept looking down the lane toward the road. So did Emily, from the porch, where she was waiting alone, holding a little bunch of wildflowers the neighbor girl had picked along the ditch.

Tom’s truck did not come.

At four o’clock, Kyle started the music, something soft on a guitar, and I went up to the porch to get her.

She put her hand through my arm, and I could feel it was cold, even in the sun.

“Dad,” she said, “walk me the long way.”

I knew what she meant. Instead of going straight down the yard, we went around the side of the red barn, past the old calf pen where she had raised her steers.

The gate still had her name painted on it, in the crooked letters a ten-year-old makes.

She stopped there. She put her hand on the top rail, careful of her dress. “Remember Duke?” she said.

Duke was her first steer. A black Angus she raised off a bottle when his mother would not take him.

He followed her around the yard like a dog, and he placed third in his class at Achievement Days, and she slept in the straw beside him the night before the sale.

“I remember,” I said. “I remember something else, too. Your mother came out here at midnight that night with a blanket. She sat on an overturned bucket in the corner of the pen until two in the morning, watching you sleep.”

Emily turned and looked at me. “She did?”

“She did. She made me promise never to tell you. She said you’d think she had gone soft.” I looked at the pen. “I guess I just broke a promise on your wedding day.”

Emily did not say anything for a long time. She just looked at the straw, and the bucket, which is still there in the corner, turned over the same way.