The Six Who Walked Ahead of Me

I do not remember a word of my vows. Luke says I said all of them and I said them loud.

The reception was everything we had planned and nothing like it. The pig was good. The fiddle player played until the battery in his amp gave out, and then Dad’s neighbor brought over a guitar.

The kids danced on the machine shed floor in their boots until the soles were gray with dust.

Marcia did not come find me until almost seven, when the sun was going low and orange across the bean field and the first tables were being cleared.

I was sitting on a hay bale by the tent with my boots off, and she sat down beside me in her pale blue dress, still holding that sunflower. She had not set it down all afternoon.

She did not say anything for a while. Then she said, “Luke told you about Sara.”

“No,” I said. “He never told me anything.”

She looked surprised. Then she nodded slowly, as if that made sense to her, and she told me herself.

Luke’s older brother had married young, a girl from the Cities, and they had a little girl named Sara.

Marcia kept Sara three days a week from the time she was born. She was there for her first steps and her first word and her first tooth.

Then, when Sara was four, the marriage came apart, ugly, and the mother took the little girl to Arizona.

There was a custody fight. It went on for two years and took most of what Luke’s brother had.

In the end the mother kept her. Marcia had not seen her granddaughter in nine years. She sent a card every birthday and a box every Christmas. Some years they came back.

“She’d be thirteen now,” Marcia said. “I don’t even know what she looks like.”

I did not say anything. There was nothing to say that would not be too small.

“When I saw those kids at Easter,” she said, “all I could think was, she’s going to love them, and somebody’s going to take them away from her. And then she’s going to know what it feels like. And I thought, if they’re not in the pictures, maybe it won’t hurt so much later. Maybe she won’t have to look at them in the album every year and wonder.”

She turned the sunflower in her hands.

“That’s not what I said to you,” she said. “I said it was about explaining. That wasn’t it. I was talking about myself.”

“I know,” I said.

“I was wrong to say it.” She said it plainly, the way you would say the price of corn.

“I was wrong, and Luke came to the house last week and told me so, and I didn’t listen to him, and then a little girl handed me a flower.”

She stopped for a minute. “I’m sorry, Becca. I would like to tell the kids I’m sorry too, if you’ll let me.”

I told her she could. And then I told her the thing I had been thinking since the garden.