Madison saw the truck and let out a whoop. Aaron saw it and stopped walking for one second, with seed in his hair, looking at that truck. Then he looked at me, standing by the passenger door in my navy suit.
“Dad,” he said. That’s all he said. And then he started to grin, the biggest grin I’d seen on him since he was ten.
I opened the cab door and held it.
Aaron came down the steps first, still grinning, birdseed bouncing off his shoulders. He put his hand on the grab bar and his foot on the step, and he climbed up past me into the cab.
Madison came down the steps holding up the front of her dress with both fists. She had flat white shoes on under it. She’d told me she would. “You can’t climb in a milk truck in heels,” she’d said. “I asked.”
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Aaron leaned down from the seat and took her hand, and I put mine against her back and steadied her up. It’s a big step up into a day cab, and a wedding dress is a lot of dress. It took the two of us and a little laughing. People on the steps were cheering like it was a touchdown.
She slid across the seat to the middle, gathering the white skirt around her like a cloud in a phone booth.
And he looked up at the visor.
He saw his mother’s picture. The yellow blouse. The garden. He reached up and touched the corner of it with one finger, the way you’d touch something that might blow away.
I was standing in the open door with my hand on the frame. He turned and looked down at me, and his eyes were full, and he said it.
“Dad, I was a coward about the toast, and I’m sorry,” he said. “But they had it wrong. Everything I know about being a decent man, I learned sitting in this seat.”
I couldn’t say anything. I just nodded. Madison reached across him and grabbed my hand on the door frame and held on.
“There’s more,” Aaron said. “I’m saying it at the hall. You’re not going to stop me.”
“I wasn’t planning to,” I said.
I shut their door, walked around the front of the truck, and climbed up into my seat. I looked over at the two of them, squeezed together on that seat with birdseed all over them, my son and my daughter-in-law. Then I put her in gear.