Chapter Three #2
WE WALKED BACK THROUGH the ranch in the early morning light.
The catering crew had started running cable near the reception tent.
A horse moved somewhere in the far pasture.
I had the camera across my body and the warm memory of a palm against my face and absolutely no plan for what to do with either.
MeeMaw was on the porch of the old homestead.
A quarter-mile east, down the live-oak drive, in the rocking chair. She was watching us cross the property with the steady attention of a woman who had been observing her family make romantic decisions for fifty years and had kept score.
She raised her hand. The gesture was not a wave.
Dutch looked at me. "You'd better go."
"Is that optional?"
"Not even a little," he said.
The live-oak drive smelled like woodsmoke and morning, and MeeMaw was already off the porch and at the bottom of the steps by the time I got there.
She took me by the elbow and marched me inside.
The old homestead smelled like cedar and Chanel No.
5 and fifty years of a family in the same rooms. The rugs had been walked on long enough to belong to the floors.
Family photographs covered every wall going back four generations: women in hats, men on horseback, children squinting into summer light, and pressed wildflowers in frames between them.
I read every new space like a photographer: light source, depth, what the room is telling me about who lives in it.
This one had good bones and fifty years of someone who cared about what went on the walls.
MeeMaw walked me through the hall and directly into the back bedroom.
She opened the closet door.
Inside, on its own hanger, was the shirt. Pink. Rhinestone-encrusted. Western-cut, pearl snaps, silver piping at the yoke, and embroidery across the shoulders that could only be described as ambitious, and that would be visible from a moving vehicle.
"1972 Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo pageant," MeeMaw said, with the tone of someone presenting evidence. "I wore it the night I won and the night I rubbed Dorothy Whitfield's nose in it, rest her soul. She had the nerve to say my stitching was uneven." A brief pause. "Her stitching was uneven."
"MeeMaw," I said carefully. "I'm working today. I was thinking something more—"
"Arms up," she said.
I put my arms up.
She buttoned me into it herself, bottom to top, with the focused efficiency of someone completing a motion they'd decided on before I'd arrived.
The rhinestones caught the light from the bedroom window.
The shoulder embroidery was, as it looked, scratchy.
The pearl snaps made small, definitive sounds.
She stepped back and looked at me with the expression of a woman surveying completed work.
"Caprice tried to borrow this shirt this morning," she said. "I told her no." She tilted her head. "You're wearing it to win a man."
She took my elbow again and steered me to the back porch, where sweet tea and a plate of biscuits and ham were already waiting on the small table between the chairs.
"Sit," she said. "You haven't eaten a real thing since yesterday."
I sat.
"That man at the barn," MeeMaw said, settling into her chair, "is fixing to lose his mind when he sees you. And you have got to stop fighting it." She picked up her tea glass. "We don't get many like that one in this family. Take what's offered."
She didn't seem to require a response. I ate a biscuit.
The porch faced east, away from the main property, out over the back field where MeeMaw's land ran to a tree line.
The morning light was at the angle that makes everything look like it's been thought about.
The bluebonnet median along the drive had gone deeply, completely blue.
I ate the ham and watched it and didn't try to organize it, just let it be the light and the bluebonnets and the sound of MeeMaw in her rocking chair.
Then I lifted my camera.
Not for the wedding gallery. For something else entirely.
Through the screen door: the fifty-year-old rugs, the photographs, the hall going warm and dim.
Through the kitchen window: the fields in the early angle of light.
MeeMaw's lavender mother-of-the-grandmother dress hanging in the doorway, ready for the afternoon.
MeeMaw's hands around her tea glass, the pearl ring on her right hand, the light going clean through it.
I photographed for forty minutes and finished everything on the plate and said very little, and MeeMaw sat beside me and said very little back, and it was the quietest I'd been since I'd landed in Texas.
Eventually she checked her watch.
"Time to go win that man, sugar," she said.
THE QUARTER-MILE BACK to the main property was all live oaks and morning sun.
My backup dress was in the tent. I thought about it for exactly one second.
Then I walked it in MeeMaw’s rhinestone shirt and my own linen skirt and the wedges I still hadn’t given up on, which was a separate personal failing I wasn’t examining today.
The rhinestones caught the morning sun in every direction at once.
The shoulder seams were scratchy. The pearl snaps glinted.
I had my camera. The bluebonnets bloomed around my ankles as I came up the drive, and I wasn't composing anything, and I wasn't running the capture list, and I was thinking about a hay bale and going very still and the specific warmth of a hand I hadn't seen coming.
I was thinking about a man who had sat six feet away on a separate hay bale and waited, without announcement, without pretense, until I was done.
I was thinking about what it felt like to laugh in the middle of crying.
The rhinestones kept catching the light, which I was choosing to interpret as an omen.
I crested the rise and the whole property spread out.
Ceremony tent, reception tent, the first guests moving toward the white chairs in their wedding clothes.
The ceremony arbor stood at the north end of the meadow with the wildflower garlands on it now, and Dutch was there, talking to Stoney, in a charcoal suit that had no business existing, a black bolo with a silver-and-turquoise slide, and a black Stetson he'd take off for the ceremony.
He looked up.
He saw me. Whatever he was saying to Stoney stopped mid-sentence.
I lifted the camera. The shutter went. He didn't move.
The band was warming up somewhere behind the tent, and the bluebonnets in the meadow caught the breeze, and four hundred people I had never seen before were starting to gather around the white chairs. I had a wedding to photograph.