The Bouquet I Handed My Mother

Walking Down the Aisle

We had the ceremony on the grass beside the barn at five o’clock, with the white fence behind us and two mares grazing in the far paddock like they had been hired for the job.

There were 180 people in the white folding chairs. Half the county, it felt like.

Men from church, girls I went to high school with, Austin’s whole family up from Bowling Green, and most of the people I write loans for.

When Mama walked down the aisle on the arm of an usher, I was standing behind the barn door with Daddy, waiting for our turn. I could not see her. But I could hear it.

It was not loud. It was a sound like wind moving through a stand of tobacco. One hundred eighty people turning to whisper to the person next to them at the same moment.

Daddy’s hand tightened on mine.

“Steady,” I whispered, and I was not sure which one of us I was saying it to.

Then the music changed, and the barn doors opened, and I walked out on my father’s arm into the September light, and I saw Austin at the end of the aisle, and for about three minutes I forgot everything else on God’s earth.

He cried. Austin Reeder, who has pulled calves out of heifers in a sleet storm, stood at the front of that aisle and cried, and when Daddy put my hand in his, he whispered, “Hey, you.”

Our pastor married us under an arbor Austin and his brother had built out of old barn wood.

It took eleven minutes. I said my vows and I meant every word, and when Austin kissed me, everybody clapped.

And then I turned around to walk back down the aisle as a married woman, and I saw my mother in the front row in her white satin gown, and I saw every head in that crowd go from her to me and back again.

What the Barn Was Saying

The reception was in the barn itself. It had been a burley tobacco barn for seventy years before the family who owned the horse farm restored it.

They had kept the tall rails and the dark old boards and hung string lights from every beam.

There were long wooden tables down both sides, with mason jars of sunflowers and white runners. Austin’s mother had made the centerpieces herself.

The smell of pulled pork and corn pudding came drifting in from the caterer’s tent out back.

It should have been perfect. And it almost was. But everywhere I went, I could hear it underneath the music.

At the punch table, two women from Mama’s cafeteria stopped talking the instant I walked up.

At the photo booth, I heard a girl I graduated with say, “I mean, who does that,” and then she saw me and smiled too wide.

Austin’s grandmother, who is eighty-one and has never held back an opinion in her life, took my hand at her table and said, “Honey, I’ve been to a lot of weddings, but I’ve never seen that.”

“Isn’t she pretty?” I said. “She looks like a movie star, doesn’t she?”

Grandma Reeder looked at me over her glasses for a long moment. Then she patted my hand.

“You are something else, young lady,” she said, and I could not tell if it was a compliment, and I decided it was.

Austin found me by the cake table. He put his arm around my waist and put his mouth against my hair.

“You okay?” he asked. “Because I will go talk to her. Or I’ll talk to your dad. Just say the word.”

“No,” I said. “Nobody’s talking to anybody. I’ve got it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” I told him honestly. “But I’ll know when I know.”

He did not argue. That is one of about a thousand reasons I married him.

He kissed my temple and went to go dance with his little niece, who had been tugging on his jacket for ten minutes.