Chapter 1 - The Job Only He Wanted
My brother asked me if he could do Dad's job.
Toby and I had been at the kitchen table for the better part of an hour, and he kept opening his mouth and closing it again.
"Can I do Dad's job? At the wedding."
I figured he meant handing out programs at the door.
"I mean walk you," he said. "The middle part. Down the middle."
Our father had been gone eleven months.
Toby is thirty-one. He has Down syndrome, and he and Dad were a matched set — Saturday mornings in the garage, the same dented travel mug passed back and forth, the same terrible puns nobody on earth laughed at except the two of them.
For eleven months I had refused to let my mind go anywhere near the question of who would stand with me at the back of St. Ambrose, because every name that came up was the wrong one.
I pressed my hand flat over my mouth. Toby just watched me and waited.
He started rehearsing that same week.
My uncle Pete told me about it afterward — Toby pacing the upstairs hallway with one arm crooked out at his side, escorting nobody, whispering the count under his breath.
He called the church himself. Didn't mention it to a single one of us. He wanted to ask Father Reyes what he was supposed to do once we reached the front.
Any time someone gently floated a doubt, he answered with the same two words.
"I practiced."
Every single person said yes.
My mother cried into a dish towel. Ethan said it was the only version of the wedding that made any sense to him.
Then, with three weeks left on the calendar, his mother raised it at dinner.
Both of us sitting there. Her son right beside her.
"He's welcome at the wedding. Obviously. Nobody's saying he can't be a guest."
"Margaret."
"I'm saying he doesn't need to be in it. Sweetheart, be practical for a second. This isn't one snapshot we're talking about. It's the entire processional — the album, the framed enlargement, the portrait that goes over our mantel too."
She said it the way you'd report a decision that had already been made in some other room.
"His face is going to be in every frame. You'll be staring at those pictures for the next forty years." A pause. "I don't want those photographs in my house."
I put my glass down on the table.
I had six sentences loaded and ready, and I fully intended to deliver every one of them, right there in her dining room, with her son listening.
That is my brother. Say his name. Say it out loud while I'm sitting at your table.
Then Ethan found my hand under the table and squeezed it. Once.
"We'll work something out," he said.
Not to me. To her.
I looked at the side of his face and understood that I wasn't going to say any of it. Not there. Not that night.
It was my wedding. I wasn't going to hand her the story of the night the bride screamed across her good china.
I told her the salmon was delicious.
I barely slept. Somewhere around three in the morning, I knew exactly what I was going to do — and none of it involved saying one more word to her.
In the morning I called our photographer.
May you like
"I need to change something about the wedding day," I said. "And I need you to keep it between us. Nobody in his family hears about it. Not his mother. Her especially."
She was quiet for a beat. "Okay," she said. "Tell me."
