Chapter 24: Left Side

On the second Saturday of November the lake was gray and flat, and the air smelled like snow that hadn't come.

Hallie did my hair in the boat shop office with a borrowed curling iron.

Her coffee sat on the filing cabinet.

She wore a green dress and her scrub clogs.

She had refused to stand up in anything else.

"You're allowed to cry," she said, "but only on this side, for the makeup."

"I haven't started."

"You started in the car."

I put on my mother's pearls in the small mirror by the door.

I did them up myself, and the clasp caught the first time.

There were twenty-two people on the dock.

I knew every one of them by name, which had never been true at any wedding of mine.

The night nurse stood at the back in a suit, with the hospice director beside him in a wool coat.

The donor's wife sat in the second row with her velvet jacket buttoned to the chin.

She had hired Cal for the staircase, and then for two bookcases, and then for her sister's kitchen.

The photographer stood at the end of the aisle with his camera, and his hands were steady.

He had said he would take the pictures for nothing, and Cal had let him.

In the front row, on the left, there was one empty folding chair with a single white rose on the seat.

I looked at it for a while.

Then I looked down the dock.

I had told Hallie I would walk it alone.

I wasn't going to leave anyone standing in my place, and I didn't need anyone to hold my arm.

I wanted to walk it myself, with the pearls on, on my own two feet.

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