The Sixty Fifth on the Church Lawn

The edge of the lawn

It was right then, while everybody was laughing, that I saw Vonda.

She was standing at the edge of the lawn, back by the last maple, where the grass meets the gravel lot.

She was in her blue church dress. She must have come in the middle of it, and stopped, and not come any farther.

She had heard it. She had heard the whole lawn laugh because our father, who forgot her name at Christmas, remembered a nickname from 1961.

She was standing where everybody could see her, and nobody was walking over to her, and she knew it.

Both cousins she’d called, the ones she’d told to stay home, saw her standing out there by herself.

Nobody said anything unkind. Nobody had to. She just stood there in front of all of it, and I watched her take it, and I didn’t go to her. Not yet.

I want to be honest. Part of me wanted her to stand there a while.

The walk

The pastor came out onto the church steps then and said, in his young voice, that if Clair and Arlene were willing, they’d do the end of it again, right here, the way they did in 1961.

Elam looked at Mom. He held out his elbow, the cane hooked over his other wrist.

“Arlene,” he said. “I believe I owe you a walk.”

Mom stood up from the head table. She was smiling in a way I hadn’t seen her smile since before the doctor in Lewistown. She handed her roses to the person nearest her, which happened to be Lottie, and she took Elam’s arm.

Then Elam unbuckled that black umbrella and shook it open, right there in the blazing sun, and held it over her head.

The lawn laughed again, softer this time. Somebody started to clap.

Lottie stood there holding Mom’s bouquet. She looked down at it, and then she looked across the lawn, and then she did something I will never forget.

She walked straight back across the grass to the edge of the lawn, to where Vonda was standing alone by the last maple. Seventy years old, in her good shoes, with that solemn face from the photograph.

“Here, honey,” Lottie said. I was close enough by then to hear it. “Your mother’s going to need these up front. You’d better be the one to carry them.”

And she put Mom’s white roses into my sister’s hands.

Vonda looked at the roses. Then she looked up at the steps, where Elam was walking Mom slowly up the walk under that open umbrella, one step and the cane, one step and the cane, with Dad waiting at the church door.

She walked forward. She walked right through the middle of all those tables, past both cousins and past every face she’d called on the phone, carrying our mother’s flowers, and she didn’t look left or right.

When she got to the steps, she stood at the bottom, off to the side, where the bridesmaids would have stood. The friend from the egg route was already there in her wheelchair, and she reached over and patted Vonda’s arm.