So the next Saturday, the seven of us and Dad drove to the farm store and bought six pairs of brown cowboy boots, the plain kind, sizes from a child’s eleven to a woman’s eight.
It came to a little over four hundred dollars. Dad paid for every pair and would not hear a word about it.
He stood at the register with his wallet out and said to the girl ringing us up, “These are my grandkids.”
She said, “You’ve got a lot of them.” He said, “Not enough.” Lily wore hers out of the store and would not take them off for two days.
I bought myself a pair too. Brown, same as theirs. My dress was ivory cotton, plain, sleeveless, with a simple skirt, and I bought it off a rack in St.
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Cloud for a hundred and sixty dollars. I had never been a fancy person and I was not about to start at thirty-seven.
Luke came home the first week of September, sunburned and thin, and slept for most of a day.
When he woke up, I told him the kids would be walking in the wedding ahead of me.
I did not tell him why. I told him they had asked to be part of it, which was true.
He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “All six?”
“All six.”
“In boots?”
“In boots. With sunflowers.”
He smiled at that, the slow smile he has. Then he said, “I’d like that.” And he went out to check the oil in his truck, and I thought that was the end of it.
I found out later that it was not. I found out later that Kayla had called him in Mobridge, the second night after the garden.
I don’t know what she said. She has never told me and he has never told me. But he had known about his mother for almost three weeks when he came home, and he never said one word about it to me, and I am still not sure whether that makes me angry or grateful.
What I do know is that a few days before the wedding, Luke went to see his mother.
He did not tell me that either. Dad saw his truck parked in front of her house on his way to the elevator, and mentioned it at supper, and Luke said only, “I had to drop something off.”
Marcia did not call me again about the kids. She came out the week before to see the tent going up, and she walked the yard with me and talked about the tablecloths, and she did not mention the six children who were running in and out of the barn the whole time she was there.
She did not ask whether they were coming. I did not tell her. I wish I could say that was grace on my part.
Mostly it was that I did not trust myself to talk about it without crying.
The wedding was on the third Saturday in September. I woke up before five out of habit and went to the barn at work anyway, because one of my fresh cows had been off her feed.
My boss, Darrell, chased me out by six thirty. “Go get married,” he said. “The cows will be here Monday.”