The second was that it did not matter at all.
Because the last two years hadn’t been her failing to cope.
They had been her deciding, quietly, that the way to solve it was to make a nine-year-old smaller.
“Pamela,” I said.
“There isn’t going to be a wedding.”
Part Eight: Sixty-One Chairs
She did not believe me for about four seconds.
Then she did, and what happened to her face I have only seen a few times, in other contexts, and it is not a thing I enjoyed watching.
“You can’t,” she said.
“Chris.
Chris.
Everyone is sitting down there.
My mother is sitting down there.”
“I know.”
“We can do this tonight.
We can do this tonight, at the house, all of it, whatever you want — I’ll go to counseling, I’ll do anything, but we cannot do it here—”
And I will say honestly that for about three seconds, that argument nearly worked.
Because everything in twenty years of training said the same thing: contain it.
Do not create a scene.
Handle it privately, handle it correctly, and preserve the dignity of everybody involved, including the person who is wrong.
I very nearly walked down those steps and got married.
What stopped me was arithmetic.
If I went down there and did the ceremony and handled it privately that night, then in twenty years the thing my daughter would remember was that she had been found in a laundry room and then the wedding had happened anyway.
She would remember standing at the back of a lawn while sixty-one people watched her father marry a woman who had put her there.
