The Front Row Seat in the Orchard

The Reception

The reception was on the grass beside the barn, long tables under the string lights, with the orchard going dark behind us and a fire going in the pit.

The Brinkses served pulled chicken and roasted potatoes and their own apple crisp.

Grandma sat at the family table at the edge of the dance floor, a plywood floor Ken had laid on the grass himself.

She still had my bouquet. She would not give it back. She said she was holding it for safekeeping.

About an hour in, after the toasts, I saw Brandi coming across the grass toward Grandma’s table with Nora.

She had kicked her shoes off somewhere. She looked about ten years younger and about ten years more tired.

She did not look at me. She went straight to Grandma and knelt down beside her chair on the grass, in her navy dress, and I was close enough to hear most of it.

“I haven’t slept since July,” she said. “Matt’s gone, and I have been doing all of it by myself, and I wanted one thing at this wedding to be easy. I wanted one thing to be about me for five minutes. And I put my hands on you to get it.”

“I know, honey,” Grandma said.

“No, you don’t. I’ve been mad at everybody for months. I’ve been mad at Allie for being happy. I’ve been mad at you for being slow. That’s what I was thinking when I pushed you. That you were slow. I’m so ashamed of that I can’t stand it.”

Grandma did not say anything for a moment. Then she held out her arms, bouquet and all, and said, “Give me that baby.”

Brandi put Nora in Grandma’s lap.

Just set her there, right on top of the lavender dress and my bouquet, and Nora’s fist closed on the ribbon and pulled the little photo of Dad halfway out, the way babies grab at anything shiny.

Grandma looked at it a long time. Then she looked across the dance floor at me, and her eyes were wet, and she nodded once.

“There’s your grandpa,” she said to Nora. “There’s your Grandpa Mike. He’d have spoiled you rotten.”

Brandi put her head down on the edge of the table next to Grandma’s arm and cried.

Grandma put her bandaged hand on the back of Brandi’s head and left it there. Nora went on chewing the ribbon.

Mom

I was standing by the fire when Mom found me. She had a cup of cider in her hand. She did not drink any of it. She just held it.

“You let her sit there anyway,” she said. “After I asked you.”

“I didn’t move Brandi’s card,” I said. “I didn’t say a word to anybody. I sat Grandma in the front row. That’s all.”

“I know.” She looked over at the family table, at Brandi with her head down and Grandma with the baby. “I was so scared Brandi would take Nora and leave. I have been scared of that girl leaving since she was four years old and couldn’t breathe.”

“I know, Mom.”

“I let her push your grandmother into a table and then I asked you to pretend it didn’t happen.” She set the cup on the edge of a hay bale. “That was wrong of me. I’m sorry, Allie. I’m sorry I made you be the easy one your whole life.”

I did not know what to say to that. So I hugged her, there by the fire, and she held on tighter than she had in years.

Then she walked across the grass to the family table, and she held her hand out to Grandma, and asked her to dance.

Grandma said she had a bad hip and a bandaged hand and a baby in her lap. Mom said she would hold her up. Brandi took Nora.

And my mother and my father’s mother went out onto Ken Brinks’s plywood floor under the string lights and swayed back and forth to the fiddle, very slow, with Grandma still holding my bouquet behind Mom’s back.

I don’t think they had danced together in all the forty years they had known each other. Half the orchard stopped to watch. Ryan came up behind me and put his chin on my shoulder.

“Good chairs,” he said.

“Good chairs,” I said.