The gold light
By seven-thirty the dancing had started on a square of plywood laid over the grass, and the sun had dropped down low over the hayfield. Everything went gold, the way it had on that beach a year before.
Bridget was standing at the edge of the pecan grove, changing a battery. She had her back to the dancing. I was sitting in a folding chair with my shoes off.
That is when I saw Eldon come across the grass.
He walked slowly, a big heavy man in a gray suit that pulled across the shoulders. He had his hands in his pockets. He stopped in front of my daughter and cleared his throat.
Bridget looked up. She did not step back. She just waited.
“Bridget,” he said. “Would you do something for me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you take one of just me and Katie?” His voice cracked on her name. “I don’t have one. I don’t have one of me and her since she was about ten years old.”
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Bridget looked at him for a long moment. I held my breath.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “But you have to let me pick where you stand.”
The picture
She went and got Katie off the dance floor. Katie came running across the grass with her dress held up in both hands, and when she saw who was waiting, she stopped.
“Daddy?”
“I’d like a picture,” Eldon said. “If that’s all right.”
Katie put both hands over her mouth. Then she walked over and took her daddy’s arm.
Bridget did not put them in the open, where he would have felt every eye on him. She walked them back into the pecans, to a spot where the trunks made a kind of doorway and the gold light came through in long bars.
She did not stand him straight at the camera either. She turned him a little to the side, with Katie in front of him, his arm around her waist. Then she lowered the camera and looked at Eldon.
“Uncle Eldon,” she said. “Look at her. Not at me. Just look at her.”
So he did.
He looked down at his daughter in her wedding dress, with the gold light on her face, and whatever had been knotted up in him for six years just came loose. You could see it from where I was sitting. His whole face changed.
Bridget took the picture. Then she took about twenty more, very fast and very quiet, and none of them knew when the shutter clicked.
When she was done, she walked over and held the screen up so Eldon could see it.
He looked at it for a long time. I watched his chin start to shake. He put his hand over his mouth the same way his daughter had.
“Is that what I look like?” he said. “To her?”
“Yes, sir,” Bridget said. “That’s exactly what you look like.”
Eldon reached out and took hold of Bridget’s hand, the one that was not holding the camera, and he held it for a second. He did not say anything else. He did not need to.
Katie was crying. Colleen was crying out at the edge of the grove. And Mama, sitting at the cake table under her big straw hat, was crying hardest of all.