The Milk Truck at the Church Steps

The rehearsal

The rehearsal was the Friday before the wedding, four in the afternoon, at the church. Saint John’s sits up on a little rise outside town, white clapboard with a tall steeple, and a cemetery out back where half the county’s grandparents are buried, mine included.

I wore khakis and a pressed shirt. I parked my pickup, not the truck, at the far end of the lot. Gordon and Cynthia Prewitt pulled in a few minutes later in a gray sedan so clean it looked like it had never been rained on.

Gordon is fifty-eight, a vice president at the bank in town, the kind of man who stands with his hands behind his back. Cynthia is fifty-six. She has her hair done every Thursday and she runs the hospital auxiliary, and I’ll say this for her, she plans a good event.

“Dennis,” Gordon said, and shook my hand. Good handshake. Dry, firm, one pump. “Good to see you.”

“Good to see you, Gordon. Cynthia.”

Cynthia smiled at me. It was a nice smile on the outside. “I’m sure Aaron told you we’ve made arrangements for the toast,” she said. “Orin Hale is going to say a few words. He’s wonderful at that sort of thing. We just thought it would take the pressure off you.”

There it was. Out loud, in the church parking lot, with the sun on the steeple.

“Aaron didn’t need to tell me,” I said.

Something moved behind her eyes. Maybe she understood that Madison had told me. Maybe she just heard that I wasn’t going to argue. She patted my arm, the way you would pat a dog you weren’t sure of.

“Well, good,” she said. “I’m so glad it’s settled.”

Aaron came out of the church right then with the pastor, and he saw me standing with his in-laws, and his face went white as the clapboard. I gave him a little nod. I tried to make it say, It’s fine, son. I don’t think it did.

The rehearsal went off without a hitch. Pastor Tjaden walked us through it twice. Madison squeezed my hand when she passed me in the aisle. Aaron didn’t look me in the eye once the whole hour.

Afterward, out in the lot, he came over to my pickup. It was going on five, the sun still well up, and the light lay warm across the cornfield.

“Dad,” he said.

“I know, son.”

“You know?”

“I know about the toast. It’s all right.”

He leaned on the pickup bed with both hands and dropped his head. “It’s not all right,” he said. “I should have said something. I just, every time I opened my mouth, I thought about Madison, and how much her mom has put into this, and how it would blow up, and I just…”

“You just kept driving,” I said.

He looked up at me. “Yeah.”

“I taught you that,” I said. “That’s on me as much as you. Go on, now. Go have supper with your bride. Tomorrow’s a good day.”

He hugged me hard, the way he used to when he was little and I came home late off the route. Then he walked back to Madison. I watched him go, and I prayed the same prayer I’d prayed on the porch steps.