The Milk Truck at the Church Steps

The church

I drove the truck to Saint John’s at noon, two hours early, before most anybody got there. I parked it along the side of the church where it wouldn’t be in the way, close enough that I could pull around to the front steps.

Madison’s maid of honor was out front with a box of programs. She looked at the truck, then at me, and her mouth fell open. Then she grinned. “Oh, she’s going to cry,” she said.

“Who is?”

“Everybody,” she said.

The church filled up. A hundred and forty people. I sat in the front pew on the groom’s side by myself, with an empty space next to me where Janet should have been. My sister Ellen drove up from Eau Claire and sat behind me with her hand on my shoulder.

The Prewitts were across the aisle. Gordon in a dark gray suit, Cynthia in pale blue. Orin Hale sat two rows behind them with his wife and a folded paper in his breast pocket. I could see the corner of it sticking out. His toast.

Then the organ started, and the doors in the back opened, and Madison came down the aisle on Gordon’s arm. And I forgot about Orin Hale and the paper in his pocket and everything else.

My boy was standing up front in a navy suit, the same color as mine. He’d picked it on purpose. I didn’t know that until later. When he saw her coming, his face did something I had not seen it do since he was a little boy on Christmas morning.

They sang “How Great Thou Art,” and I sang it too, under my breath, because I can’t carry a tune and I didn’t want to wreck it for anybody. Pastor Tjaden talked about the two becoming one. Aaron’s voice shook on his vows. Madison’s didn’t shake at all.

When the pastor said, “You may kiss the bride,” Lester Brandt, three rows back, said “Attaboy” loud enough for the whole church to hear, and everybody laughed, and that was how I knew Lester had come.

The truck

While they were signing the papers in the back with the pastor, I slipped out the side door. I climbed up into the cab, started her up, and eased the truck around to the front of the church. I set the brakes right at the bottom of the steps and climbed down.

The sun was out full. It was a little after three o’clock on a September afternoon, about seventy degrees, the maples just starting to turn at the tips. The tank was so bright in that light it hurt to look at.

People were coming out onto the steps, holding little paper bags of birdseed. Somebody saw the truck and said, “Is that…?” and then somebody else laughed, and then the whole crowd on the steps was turning and pointing and pulling out their phones.

Cynthia Prewitt came out the double doors and stopped dead on the top step.

I watched her look from the truck to me and back to the truck. I watched her look down the lot for the white rental car with the fins, which was parked down by the road where Madison had told the driver to wait and then go home with his money.

Her face went through about four things at once. I didn’t enjoy it. I want to be honest about that. I’d thought maybe I would, at two in the morning some nights, and when it came, I didn’t. She just looked like a woman who’d had a plan and lost it.

Gordon came out behind her. He saw the truck. He put his hand on his wife’s back and didn’t say a word.

Then the doors opened again and here they came, Aaron and Madison, holding hands, and the whole front of the church went up in birdseed like a flock of sparrows taking off at once.