“I’m the bride! Put those down!”
One of the men nearly dropped the stack. I can’t blame him. How often does a woman in a veil chase your truck across a public park?
I was seventy-eight, getting married for the second time. My granddaughter Jo was supposed to scatter rose petals. Instead, she put down the basket and grabbed one end of a picnic bench.
“We still need somewhere for people to sit,” she said.
The pavilion attendant showed me the cancellation. My son, Patrick, had booked the chairs and paid the deposit as his gift to us. He had called that morning and said the ceremony was off.
I found him behind the pavilion holding a ribbon his father and I had used at our fortieth anniversary.
“Did you cancel my wedding?”
“Just the chairs,” he said, then heard how ridiculous that sounded.
He had gone to his father’s grave that morning. He’d started telling him about the wedding and found he couldn’t say the groom’s name. So he called the rental company. He wanted the day to stop for an hour. It hadn’t occurred to him that everybody else was still coming.
“I miss him too,” I said. “I had twenty years to get used to an empty chair. I want somebody in the one beside me.”
Patrick offered to take me down the aisle. I told him Jo already had that job. He could help her with the benches.
He did. He also paid the crew to unload the chairs they still had. By the time my groom arrived, our guests were sitting on a magnificent assortment of picnic furniture and folding metal.
My new husband asked why one chair had a peach ribbon while the others had flowers.
“Patrick tied it,” I said.
It was beside my son’s seat. During the vows, he laid his hand on the wooden back. He cried. He stayed.
When Jo took the pictures, she asked us all to squeeze together. Patrick stood behind my new husband. For the first time that day, he called him George.
For more family secrets and startling interruptions, follow a crew’s discovery in “The Girl at the Window Counted Four Kittens. We Only Had Three”, an old mare’s return in “Our Old Mare Came Back Without My Father. Then the Roof Over Her Stall Gave Way”, and an unexpected visitor on opening night in “My Daughter Had One Line and Three Knocks. On Opening Night, Somebody Else Knocked Twice”.
