The Six Who Walked Ahead of Me

She nodded. Then she said the thing that changed my whole plan, though she did not mean it to.

“Then don’t hide us in the back,” she said. “If we’re coming, let us be in it.”

I looked at her for a long moment. Then I said, “Okay. Then you’re in it.”

The next morning, before I went to work, I called Monica at the county office. I am a careful person about rules, and foster care has a lot of them, and I did not want to do anything that would put a single placement at risk.

Monica laughed when I asked. “Becca, they’re your kids for as long as they’re in your care. Of course they can be in your wedding. We encourage it. It’s normal family life.”

Then she went over the pictures with me, which I had already thought about.

The rule was simple enough. The photographer could take all the pictures she wanted, and the kids could have copies, and I could keep them.

Nothing would go online with faces and names. She asked me to talk to the photographer and to put a little note on the guest tables. I said I would, and I did.

Then she asked me how I was going to do it. I told her I didn’t know yet.

I only knew that all six were going to walk down that aisle, and they were going to walk in front of me, not behind.

“Good,” she said. “Send me one of the pictures for their files. They’ll want it someday.”

That night I sat down at the kitchen table with the six of them and a pan of bars.

I told them there was going to be a wedding, and they were all going to be in it.

I did not tell them what Marcia had said. Kayla knew, and Kayla did not say a word, and I loved her for that.

“What do we wear?” Ona asked right away.

“What do we carry?” said Abby.

And it was Lily, with chocolate on her chin, who pointed out the window at the garden and said, “The big flowers.”

The sunflowers. The kids had planted them in May. Every one of them had a row. Milo had measured his every Saturday with a yardstick and written the number on the barn wall in pencil.

Clayton had put a scarecrow in his made out of an old feed sack. Lily’s were the smallest and she was the proudest of them.

So that was the flowers settled. They would carry what they grew.

For clothes, we went simple. White shirts for the boys, plain white dresses or white shirts and skirts for the girls, whatever they liked best, from the store in Alexandria and the church rummage sale.

Ona wanted a dress with pockets and we found one. Kayla wanted a shirt, not a dress, and that was fine with me.

The boots were Dad’s idea. He was sitting at the end of the table with his coffee, listening, and he said, “Every one of them ought to have a good pair of boots. That’s the first thing my dad ever bought me that wasn’t secondhand.”