The Courthouse Steps Sixty Five Years Later

Why the courthouse

I made us coffee, and I sat down, and I asked her about that day. I did not know if she could tell me. She could.

“Arnie’s unit got called up,” she said. “The Army Reserve. There was all that trouble in Berlin, with the wall going up, and Kennedy called up the reserves that fall, and Arnie’s unit got its letter. The letter came the first week of October. They had to report on Sunday, the fifteenth. We had eleven days.”

She said it plainly, like she was reading it off a card. Every number was right. I looked it up later on my phone in the car, and every number was right.

“Pastor Lindquist wanted us to do the classes first,” she said. “Six weeks of classes. My father said we could wait until Arnie came home. Arnie said he wasn’t going to Germany without being married to me. So we went to the courthouse.”

“On a Saturday?” I asked.

“The courthouse closed at noon on Saturday,” she said, and she smiled. “So Judge Halvorson came back down after dinner in his shirtsleeves and married us right on the top step, out in the sun. My mother cried. Arnie’s brother took the picture with a Brownie camera. Then we had cake in my mother’s kitchen, and that was the wedding.”

“That’s the whole wedding?”

“That was the whole wedding,” she said. “It was a very good one.”

She picked up the photo again and turned it toward the window, to get the light on it.

“He went to Fort Lewis,” she said. “I wrote him every single day. Two hundred and some letters. He came home in August. We never did have the church wedding. We always said we would, and then Glen came, and then Joanne came, and then there was always a payment on something.”

I watched her face. She was all there, in that moment. Every bit of her.

“Grandma,” I said, “would you want to stand on those steps again?”

She set the picture down. “What do you mean?”

“On your anniversary. You and Grandpa. On the same steps, sixty-five years later. Just to stand there. Maybe take a new picture.”

She thought about it. She didn’t answer right away, and I didn’t push. I have learned that with my kindergartners, too. If you ask a person a real question, you have to give them room to actually decide.

“What would I wear?” she asked at last.

“Whatever you want.”

She looked down at herself, at her cardigan and her slacks. Then she got up, slowly, with one hand on the table, and walked into the bedroom, and I heard the closet door. When she came back she was holding a soft blue dress on a wire hanger, plain, with three-quarter sleeves.

“The blue one,” she said. “Arnie always liked me in blue.”