The Six Who Walked Ahead of Me

So she sat there, half turned, and watched all six walk past her, one at a time, with the whole yard watching her watch them.

I am not proud of how that felt. I am telling it because it is true to the story.

Then Lily, at the front of the line, did something none of us had practiced.

She stopped. Right in the middle of the aisle, right beside the second row. She stood there in her boots and looked at Marcia, and then she took one of her three sunflowers out of her little bouquet and held it out across the end of the row.

“This one’s for you,” she said, loud enough for the back row to hear. “I grew it.”

Nobody in that yard breathed. The fiddle kept playing. Abby bumped into Lily from behind and stopped too, and so did Ona and Clayton, and the whole line of them stood there in the grass, waiting.

Marcia looked at the sunflower. Then she looked up, past all six children, and found me standing at the back by myself in my ivory dress.

And I saw something go across her face that I had never seen there before.

She put out her hand and took it.

Her fingers were shaking. She held that sunflower in her lap with both hands like it was something that might break.

And then Marcia Granger, who balanced the grain elevator books for thirty years without a single error, put her face down into the petals and cried in front of a hundred and forty people.

Lily, satisfied, turned around and kept walking.

At the front, Luke was waiting. I had not told him what to do, and he did not need me to.

As each child reached the arch, he bent down and hugged them, one at a time, every one, in front of everybody. Kayla and Milo had gotten theirs first.

He picked Lily right up off her feet. He hugged Abby and fixed the clip in her hair.

He hugged Clayton and Clayton hugged back so hard Luke staggered. He gave Ona a hug. Milo, who was twelve and particular, had held out his hand to Luke first, and then taken the hug anyway.

When Kayla had reached the front earlier, he did not hug her right away. He leaned down and said something in her ear.

I have never found out what it was. She nodded, and then she let him hug her, and she held onto him for a long moment with her sunflower squashed between them. I only saw it from the back, and I saw it again in the pictures.

Then the six of them lined up beside the arch, in their boots, holding their flowers, and I walked down the aisle alone.

Past Dad in the front row, wiping his eyes with a red handkerchief. Past Marcia, who looked up at me as I went by, holding the sunflower, and did not look away.

I married Luke Granger at three-fifteen on a September Saturday in front of a red barn. Pastor Karen read the part from Ruth, about whither thou goest, because I had asked her to.