And whatever I said to her afterward, in a car, in a kitchen, at any point in her life, would be argued against by that memory, and it would lose.
Protecting Pamela from that lawn meant handing the humiliation to a nine-year-old and asking her to carry it quietly.
She had already been carrying things quietly for eighteen months.
That was the entire problem.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it.
“I’m not doing it that way.”
I went down the steps.
The coordinator saw me coming and made a hand signal to the quartet, who started the processional, because that is what she was there to do and she had no way of knowing.
Sixty-one people stood up.
I have thought about how to describe the next ninety seconds and the honest answer is that it was not dramatic.
It was extremely quiet and slightly absurd and everybody was very polite.
I walked up the aisle the wrong way, which took about eleven seconds, and got to the arbor, and the music stopped raggedly, and I picked up the microphone off the stand.
“Thank you all for being here,” I said.
“There isn’t going to be a wedding today.”
Nobody said anything.
Somewhere in the fourth row somebody’s chair creaked.
“I’m not going to give you the details, and I’d ask you not to speculate about them, and I’d ask you especially not to ask my daughter about any of this.”
I looked at the back of the lawn, where Samantha was standing at the corner of the terrace with Hannah beside her.
“Twenty minutes ago I found Hannah sitting on the floor of the laundry room in this building.
She’d been told to stay there until the ceremony was over, because it wouldn’t be appropriate for her to be up here with me today.
“She’s nine.
She did what an adult told her to do.
She didn’t do anything wrong, and I want every person in this garden to hear me say that out loud, because she is standing right there and she has spent the last twenty minutes worrying that this is her fault.”
I put the microphone back on the stand.
