Plowed by My Stepfather novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Wedding

The church-kitchen woman brought my mother's wedding dress down from the attic on Thursday, wrapped in a bedsheet.

She had taken it in at the waist and let out the hem, and she wouldn't say when she had found time.

"Your mother wore this for your father," she said. "She'd want you in it for the man who actually does the dishes."

I laughed, and then I had to sit down on the stairs.

The wedding was in the yard on Saturday, at four in the afternoon.

The corn stood stripped and golden in the fields, and the maples along the lane had gone red.

Birdie and the neighbors had set out rows of folding chairs on the grass, and the tables from the Sunday dinner were loaded with casseroles.

There were more than a hundred people.

They sat in rows and stood in the doorways, and they had all brought something.

The old man in the John Deere cap had brought a bale of straw to sit on, in case there weren't enough chairs.

The sheriff stood at the back in his dress uniform, and his wife cried before I even came out.

I came out of the house on my own.

Nobody was going to give me away, and I'd said so.

I walked down the porch steps with my mother's recipe tin held in both hands, because I had nowhere else to put it.

Dean stood at the end of the aisle in his one suit jacket.

It was too tight across his shoulders.

It was the same jacket he had worn to the memorial lunch in April, and he watched me come toward him without blinking.

I kept my eyes on his face the whole way.

When I reached him he took the tin from my hands and gave it to Birdie, who was already crying into the flowers.

"You wore the jacket," I whispered.

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