The Baby News Grandma Posted For Us

“He still has the frame,” she said. “It’s in the closet in the spare room. He won’t throw it away and he won’t look at it.”

“I’m so sorry, Mallory,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I wish we’d known.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s the thing. Kirk thought if nobody knew, nobody could feel sorry for us. And then he turned around and asked you to hide yours. That’s backwards, isn’t it? I told him that. That’s backwards.”

We sat there a while. She wiped her face with a napkin and laughed a little at herself.

“Okay,” she said. “That isn’t actually why I asked you here. Or it is, but there’s something else.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve got four bridesmaids,” she said. “My sister, my two best friends from Kirkwood, and my cousin. And I want five. I want you to stand up with me.”

I just looked at her.

“Mallory, I’ll be thirty-two weeks in June. I’ll be huge. I’ll be the size of a feed sack.”

“I know,” she said. “I did the math. We’ll find a dress with room in it. I don’t care what color it is. You can stand in the back if you want. You can sit down during the vows. I just want you up there.”

“Why?” I asked. I meant it honestly, not in a bad way.

She thought about it a long time.

“Because if you’re up there,” she said finally, “then the baby’s in the wedding too. And then it isn’t a thing that’s competing with us. It’s just part of it. It’s family. That’s what I want our wedding to be.”

I did not have anything to say to that. So I said yes.

Grady and Kirk did not make up in one conversation. Men like them do not do anything in one conversation.

In February, during the cold snap when it went to eighteen below, Kirk’s furnace quit at two in the morning. Kirk could have called the emergency line at Grady’s company.

He called Grady’s cell phone instead.

Grady pulled his navy work jacket on over his sweatshirt and drove to Marion in the dark. He came home near six smelling like basement and coffee, and sat on the bed to unlace his boots.

“Get it going?” I asked.

“Yeah. Ignitor was cracked. I had one on the van.”

“You two talk?”

He set his boots by the door. “Some. We sat on the basement steps after. He told me about the frame in the closet.”

“Mallory told me about that.”

“He wants to give it to Grandma at the wedding,” Grady said. “He wants to tell her. And Dad. He said he’s tired of having a thing in a closet.” He got back into bed. “I told him I’d stand next to him when he did it.”

The wedding was June thirteenth at a barn venue outside of Anamosa, on a hill above the Wapsipinicon. It was one of those June days that makes you forgive Iowa for February. Seventy-eight degrees, a little breeze, cottonwood fluff in the air.

Mallory found me a dress, a soft sage green with an empire waist and enough room in it for me, the baby and probably a third person.

I was thirty-two weeks and four days. My ankles were the size of grapefruits. Mallory’s sister kept a folding chair behind the bridesmaids the whole ceremony, and I did sit down once, and I did not care.

Grandma Willie sat in the front row in a navy dress and a corsage the size of a dinner plate. She had gotten her hair set the day before, special. She cried during the vows and she did not wipe it away.