The Bouquet I Handed My Mother

Aunt Dot

Around half past six, while the sun was getting low and the string lights were starting to glow against the dark wood, my Aunt Dot found me by the side door where I had gone for a breath of air.

Dot is Mama’s older sister, fifty-four, a rural mail carrier with a voice like a gravel road. She had on a dark green dress and a cardigan, because Dot is cold in every weather.

She leaned on the door frame next to me. For a while neither of us said anything.

Out in the paddock, the two mares had moved up by the fence to see what the noise was about.

“I’m sorry about your mama,” Dot said finally.

“It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not all right. But I’m going to tell you something, because I think you ought to know it. Has your mama ever told you about the day she got married?”

I shook my head. I knew the bare bones. I knew Mama and Daddy went to the courthouse in Harrodsburg when she was twenty-one and he was twenty-four. I had never thought to ask much more than that.

“I was there,” Dot said. “I was the witness. Your granddaddy, our daddy, said a wedding was money thrown in a ditch. He wouldn’t pay for a cake, wouldn’t pay for a dress, wouldn’t come. Said if she wanted to get married, she could do it on her own dime.”

I had never known that side of it. Mama’s daddy died when I was four.

I remembered him only as a hard old man with a cane who never let us in the front room.

“She didn’t have a dime,” Dot said. “She was making five dollars and something an hour at the Dairy Queen. So she got the license at the county clerk’s office, and the judge-executive married them down the hall that same afternoon.”

“What did she wear?” I asked, though I think I already knew.

“My sundress.” Dot laughed, but it was not a happy laugh. “A yellow sundress with little white flowers on it, from the Walmart. Two sizes too big for her. We pinned it in the back with safety pins in the restroom.”

Dot looked out at the horses.

“She stood in that hallway with a bunch of dandelions your daddy picked off the courthouse lawn. And she kept looking at a girl down the hall getting her pictures taken in a white dress for some other wedding. Just kept looking.”

My throat closed up. I did not say anything.

“Twenty-eight years,” Dot said. “She’s talked to me about that white dress for twenty-eight years. Every wedding we ever went to. She’d see the bride come down the aisle and she’d grip my arm. I don’t think she’s ever gotten over it.”

“Then why didn’t she just tell me?” I said. “If she wanted a white dress, she could have told me. I’d have understood.”

“Because she’s ashamed, honey. Ashamed she wanted it so bad. Ashamed she took the money. You know your mama. She’d rather die than ask anybody for anything.”

Dot shook her head. “I don’t excuse it. What she did today was wrong, and she knows it. But I’d bet my last dollar she couldn’t stop herself.”