The board cracked under Grandpa’s right shoe. His cane hit the stone ahead of us, and the arm tucked through mine slipped free as he dropped.
I turned in time to see his left hip hit the wood. His right leg had gone through almost to the knee. He caught himself with one palm on the edge of the stone landing. Then his fingers started to slide.
I dropped my bouquet, went down on both knees and caught his forearm.
“Daniel! Take his arm!”
Daniel was three strides away. A second earlier he’d been smiling at me over the heads of our flower girls. Now he was on his knees beside me with one hand beneath Grandpa’s elbow and the other around his wrist.
“I’ve got him, Annie.”
I kept hold until I felt Daniel take the weight of Grandpa’s upper body. Then I slipped an arm behind Grandpa’s shoulders. His hip was still on the boards. Between us we kept him from sliding farther into the gap.
Grandpa tried once to draw his knee back. His fingers closed on my sleeve.
“Annie. My foot’s stuck.”
Behind us a chair scraped back. Then a dozen did. I felt the boards shiver beneath his hip as someone stepped onto the wooden walkway.
Grandpa sucked in a breath.
“Every time somebody steps there,” he said, “I feel it against my ankle.”
A woman in a black catering apron heard him. She stepped sideways across the entrance to the walkway, both arms out.
“Everybody stay on the lawn, please. Give him room.”
My uncle Ed stopped with one foot in the air. He set it back in the grass. The trembling under Grandpa stopped.
It was the first thing any of us did that made him feel better, and it came from listening to the man on the ground.
His name is Arthur. He was seventy-nine that October. He’d taught me to drive a stick shift, to send back eggs if I’d ordered them over easy and they came out hard, and to get a loose screw started by turning it backward until I felt the threads catch. He had an opinion on every pair of tires I’d ever owned.
On the morning of my wedding he’d spent ten minutes in the pavilion kitchen polishing his brown shoes with a dish towel. I’d teased him about it.
“Nobody’s taking pictures of your feet, Grandpa.”
“Well,” he’d said, sitting back to admire the shine, “they might.”
Now one of those shoes was somewhere under the floor, and I would have given a great deal to hear him say something that ordinary again.
The woman in the apron introduced herself as Ruth. She was running the catering crew. One of her servers was on the phone with emergency dispatch. Another had gone to the entrance off Miller Road so the responders wouldn’t lose time at the locked delivery gate. Ruth sent the fourth to move the flower stand out of their path. Then she took her place again between the guests and the damaged walkway.
My mother came around on the grass. She saw Grandpa’s cane in the flowers, my bouquet on the stone and Daniel down on one knee. She took one look at my face and stayed exactly where she was.
“Dad, it’s Helen,” she said. “I’m right beside you, down here on the lawn.”
“I can hear you, Helen.”
She put her hand to her mouth. She’d needed to hear him answer for himself. So had I.
The quartet had stopped halfway through the piece I’d chosen for the walk. Somewhere behind us, our youngest flower girl asked her sister if she was allowed to pick up the roses I’d dropped. Her sister, who was seven and took the responsibilities of being seven seriously, said they should wait until somebody told them what kind of emergency it was.
I remember that. I remember a little piece of gravel pressing through my dress into my right knee. I remember Daniel’s cuff link resting against Grandpa’s wrist. For several minutes the three of us occupied one small square of stone and wood, and I could have drawn every inch of it afterward.
“Are you all right holding me like that?” Grandpa asked.
“Yes.”
“Your wrist used to give you trouble.”
“I was thirteen. It’s recovered.”
“Good,” he said, and let himself lean a little more comfortably against me.
I wanted somebody to tell me how it was going to end. I settled for asking what had happened to his foot. Could he feel the board? Was it his knee that hurt? Did he want me to shift my arm?
“Annie,” he said after my fourth question. “One at a time, sweetheart. I’m trying to answer the first one.”
That was the first moment I felt like his granddaughter again.
When the rescue crew arrived, Ruth walked them down the stone path Daniel had used. The first firefighter knelt in front of Grandpa and introduced herself as Nora. She spoke to him while her partner went around to the lawn to look beneath the walkway.
From the side, wooden skirting hid almost everything below the boards. He directed his light through a narrow gap. I saw the beam move across the grass beneath the deck.
“There’s a little hatch farther down,” I said. “Grandpa and I used to get tennis balls through it.”
Ruth heard me. She and another server moved an empty folding table off the lawn and exposed the old slatted hatch. The firefighter opened it. He had a view of the underside of the break now, and a clear line to his partner above.
Nora took over supporting Grandpa. Daniel drew back first. It took me a moment longer to open my hand. I’d been gripping the back of his jacket so hard the seam had printed a red line across my palm.
“I’ll be down here on the grass,” I told him.
“Go on, then. You can tell me what my shoe looks like.”
I came around beside my mother. From down there the problem finally made sense. When Grandpa’s foot had broken through, the toe of his shoe had swung under a crosspiece. The board had tilted back against his ankle. Every time he tried to lift his knee, the shoe caught.
The crew worked from both sides. While Nora kept Grandpa steady, her partner freed the broken wood that was pressing on his trouser leg. A small piece of board came out into the daylight. Then I saw the toe of that polished shoe turn.
Above us, Grandpa let out a breath.
“That’s better,” he said.
They eased his leg clear. The shoe stayed behind.
For a second nobody spoke. Then one of the firefighters reached under the walkway and brought out a brown dress shoe with its lace still tied in a neat double knot.
Grandpa looked at it from the stretcher.
“You’d better give that to Annie,” he said. “She was expecting a picture.”
My mother sat down on the grass and started to laugh. It took her a minute to stop crying long enough to get back up.
At the hospital, the doctor told us Grandpa had sprained his ankle and cut his shin badly enough to need stitches. Nothing was broken. I’d been holding myself together quite efficiently until I heard those two words. Then I had to excuse myself and cry into a paper towel in the restroom.
When I came out, Daniel was waiting with sweatpants, sneakers and a grilled cheese cut diagonally. He’d remembered I hadn’t eaten since six that morning. He’d also remembered the diagonal, which was why, when I saw the sandwich, I nearly started all over again.
“Where’d you get my clothes?”
“Your mom had an overnight bag in her trunk. She also has a sewing kit, three kinds of tape and enough breath mints for the entire hospital.”
“That sounds like her.”
I asked about the guests. Ruth had served lunch while the food was hot. The venue manager had closed the wooden walkway and arranged to have the rest of the deck inspected. People who needed to get back to children or get on the road had left messages for us in the guest book. The quartet had stayed through lunch, playing requests. Apparently my uncle Ed knew all the words to “Blue Moon.”
“And us?” I asked.
Daniel picked a crumb of bread from the fold in my skirt.
“I still want to get married,” he said. “I’m free this afternoon if you are.”
We agreed we could wait. Grandpa had just had an accident, and I was prepared to pick another date. We could go down to the courthouse on Monday. We could do it in Mom’s kitchen. After the morning we’d had, my feelings about flowers and chair placement had changed considerably.
When I went back into the room, Grandpa was looking through the clear hospital bag that held his things.
“Inside pocket of my jacket,” he said. “See if they’re there, would you?”
I reached in and pulled out a dark green cloth pouch. The two wedding rings clicked together inside.
I’d completely forgotten he had them.
My grandmother had sewn that pouch years ago for the reading glasses she was forever losing. A little crooked H for Hazel was still stitched near the drawstring. We’d found it when we cleaned out their bedroom after she died.
“You kept them safe,” I said.
“Well, I’ve had enough practice carrying them.”
“I gave them to you yesterday.”
“I mean the walking part.”
He picked at the corner of the blanket. My grandfather could deliver an opinion to a roomful of strangers, but getting him to admit he’d tried hard at something was another matter.
Finally he asked, “You know that blue tape down my hallway?”
I did. I’d seen a strip of painter’s tape by the coat hook when I brought him groceries. There was another near the kitchen. I’d assumed he was planning one of those small improvements that would occupy him for six months and leave him with an entire jar of leftover screws.
“I asked Daniel to measure the aisle for me when you booked the place,” he said. “Thirty-four feet from where we were supposed to start walking to where I was supposed to let you go.”
I turned to Daniel. He nodded. “He asked me in June.”
Grandpa had laid out thirty-four feet in his apartment. Nearly every evening after supper he put on his good shoes, took his cane and walked from the strip by the coat hook to the strip in front of the kitchen sink.
The first week he’d had to stop at the linen closet. By August he could do it in one go. In September he started carrying a folded bath towel over his left arm.
“A towel?”
“Needed to keep the arm the right height. You’re a good deal shorter than your grandmother.”
For a moment all I could see was his narrow hallway with its brass light fixture, the towel from the bathroom and the two strips of blue tape. All the evenings I’d called and asked what he was doing, and he’d said, “Oh, puttering around.”
That had been his word for walking his granddaughter down the aisle a hundred times before anybody saw him do it once.
I sat down.
“Grandpa, you could’ve told me you were worried about the distance. We could have started closer.”
“I know. I wanted the whole walk.”
I understood that. My grandmother had been gone three years. During those years he’d surrendered the keys to his truck, traded the house for an apartment and learned to ask somebody else to carry the heavy end of things. This was something he’d chosen because he wanted to do it with me. He’d enjoyed the ridiculous business with the towel. He’d looked forward to wearing the shoes.
And then, with Daniel close enough to touch, an old board had given way.
“I’m pretty sore about that last step,” he admitted.
“So am I.”
We sat there and let ourselves be sore about it. Nobody told him everything happens for a reason. My grandfather had earned the right to be disappointed in a piece of wood.
A little later he picked up the green pouch and tipped the rings back and forth in his palm.
“Is there still anybody there?” he asked.
“At the pavilion?”
“Wherever you two are getting married.”
Daniel called Ruth. Most of our families were still there. The brick terrace beside the reception room had a level entrance from the driveway and room for the remaining chairs. Our officiant was eating a second piece of pie and said the rest of her evening was open.
Grandpa listened, considering. He’d been discharged. My mother could take him straight home if he got tired.
“Could I give you the rings sitting down?” he asked.
I’d had some fairly elaborate ideas about my wedding day. That was the easiest question anybody asked me all year.
We got married toward evening. My dress had a gray smudge at both knees. Daniel had mustard on one cuff from the sandwich he’d bought for himself. The florist trimmed the broken stems from my bouquet and tied what remained with a length of green ribbon.
We put Grandpa’s chair at the front of the terrace, on the same level as ours. This time Daniel and I walked in together. When we reached him, Grandpa opened the pouch. He put Daniel’s ring in my hand, then kept hold of my fingers a second longer.
“Made it,” he said.
Afterward, Ruth brought him cake. The little flower girls returned my loose roses in two plastic drinking cups. Mom took a picture of his good brown shoe and the hospital sock on his other foot. It’s in our album between the exchange of rings and Uncle Ed singing with the quartet.
Three weeks later I visited Grandpa at his apartment. The tape was still there. One end of the strip by the kitchen had curled up, and I bent to smooth it flat.
“Do you want me to take this off while I’m down here?” I asked.
“Leave it a bit.”
I hung up my coat. He stood beside the first blue line with his cane in his right hand and offered me his left arm. He had on regular walking shoes. We took our time. The apartment smelled of coffee. Somewhere upstairs a washing machine went into its spin cycle.
We passed the linen closet, rounded the corner and stopped together in front of his kitchen sink.
Thirty-four feet.
This time we got the whole walk.
When one sudden accident changes everything, the people who step in can matter most – read the story of a classmate who had to return a wheelchair and the parade that stopped for a grandfather’s dog. For another tense moment at a family outing, follow the bikers who opened a path at the fair.
