The Front Row Seat in the Orchard

By the Cars

Ryan and Megan got her up between them and into her chair, the front-row aisle chair, the one she had been sitting in to begin with.

The card with her name on it was soaked with cider. Somebody set the punch table back on its legs.

Brandi was standing at the end of the row with Nora. Her face was white. She opened her mouth and closed it again.

Then she turned and walked off toward the cars with the baby, fast, the way she walks when she is about to cry and does not want anyone to see.

Mom went after her. Our mother, Deb, has gone after Brandi every time Brandi has walked away from anything for thirty-three years.

I watched her catch up by the gravel lot and put her arm around her.

I stayed with Grandma until she had her color back and the pastor had finished saying, three times, how glad he was it was nothing worse.

Then I walked out to the lot, because somebody had to.

Mom met me halfway, between the last row of trees and the parked cars.

The sun was low and the whole orchard had gone gold, and I remember thinking how pretty it was, and how much I wanted to scream, and how I was not going to.

“Before you say anything,” Mom said. “She knows. She knows, Allie. She feels terrible.”

“She shoved Grandma into a table.”

“She didn’t shove her. She was trying to hurry her. Grandma was already off balance.”

“Mom. I watched her.”

Mom put her hand flat on her chest, the way she does. She looked back toward Brandi’s car.

Brandi was sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open and Nora in her lap, and she was crying hard enough that I could see her shoulders from forty feet away.

“Matt has been gone eight weeks,” Mom said quietly. “He took the good car and the savings account and he calls when he feels like it. She has not slept more than three hours in a row since July. She is hanging on by her fingernails.”

I knew all that. I had driven to her house in Jenison twice in August with groceries and done her dishes while she slept on the couch.

I knew exactly how tired she was. It did not change what I had watched her hands do.

“I need you to keep the peace tomorrow,” Mom said. “I’m asking you. Don’t say anything to her. Don’t make it a thing. If you make it a thing, she will pack up that baby and go, and you know her, she will keep Nora away from all of us. Grandma included. For months.”

That was the part that landed. Brandi had done it before, smaller. After a fight on the Fourth of July she had not brought Nora around for six weeks.

Grandma had cried about it on the phone, which Grandma does not do.

“So what do you want,” I said.

“Just let her have the seat,” Mom said. “She needs the aisle for the stroller anyway. I’ll move Grandma to the second row, right behind. Grandma won’t care. You know she won’t care. It’s one day.”

I did not answer. I said I had to go back for the rest of the rehearsal, and I went.

Mom took that as a yes. Mom has always taken my quiet as a yes. It is how I got through being the easy daughter.