Forty Chairs Under the Cottonwood

The pastor had just started the reading from Corinthians, love is patient, when I felt somebody at my elbow.

It was Josh’s grandpa, Walt, rolling his oxygen cart over the grass.

Behind him came Josh’s dad, carrying an old gray metal folding chair I keep in the barn by the feed bunk, the one with the bent leg I sit on to doctor calves.

Josh’s dad unfolded it and set it beside the front row, right next to Lisa, and tapped the seat twice. Walt leaned in and said, low, “Sit down, Roger. You’ve been on your feet since daylight.”

I sat. The bent leg rocked a little under me, the way it always does.

Lisa reached over without looking at me and put her hand on my arm, just for a moment, and then she took it back and folded her hands in her lap.

Emily saw all of it from the platform. I watched her see it.

She looked at her mother, and then at me, and then at that old barn chair, and she smiled the way she smiled when Duke took third.

Then she turned to Josh, and they were married under my grandfather’s cottonwood with forty-one of us there to see it.

Afterward, there was the food, and the kuchen, and the beer from Josh’s cooler.

Kyle played old country songs and new ones, and the little kids ran in circles around the tree until they fell down in the grass.

Emily danced with Josh first. Then she danced with me, to an old Don Williams song I had told her about years ago and never thought she remembered.

Then she walked straight across the grass and held out her hand to her mother.

Lisa danced with her daughter in the green dress she had bought for a country club, in a mowed pasture, in heels that kept sinking in.

The two of them laughed about the heels the whole song. Tom stood next to me and watched.

“She bought that dress in April,” Tom said quietly. “She tried it on every Sunday after church. I think she knew in April. She just couldn’t let go of it.”

“Bonnie?” I asked.

“Her breathing’s bad this week,” he said. “She wanted to come. She couldn’t have managed the grass. Lisa didn’t want to leave her, and then Bonnie told her to go.” He paused. “Bonnie said, ‘Go stand by your girl. I should have stood by mine.'”

I did not have anything to say to that. I just stood there and watched Lisa and Emily dance.

When the sun was down behind the cottonwood and the yard lights had come on, Lisa found me by the stock tank.

She had taken her heels off and was carrying them, walking barefoot in the cool grass, which I had not seen her do in thirty years.

“I lost the deposit,” she said. “All six thousand. I know you know.”

“I heard,” I said.

“And I called every one of those people. Two hundred and four, it turned out. Mom kept adding.” She laughed a little and wiped her face. “I’m going to be paying that card off for a while. Tom calls it tuition.”

“I’m sorry, Lisa,” I said. “I mean that.”