Chapter 3 - The Walk Up the Aisle
And then, instead of heading toward his classmates or the photographer waiting stage left, Nathan came down the front steps.
And started up the center aisle.
Toward me.
The noise in the room swelled. Someone laughed again, high and mean. A girl a few seats over stage-whispered, "Oh my God, is he actually doing this?"
Nathan kept coming.
He stopped right in front of my seat in the third row. And for the first time all day, I watched his face break.
His eyes were wet.
"This is FOR YOU," he said, low, just for me. Then he swallowed hard. "Both of them."
My breath snagged in my throat.
He reached into the pocket of the red dress — Claire's dress had pockets, she'd loved that about it — and pulled out something small and flat, wrapped in tissue paper.
Behind him the laughing went on another few seconds.
Then he peeled the tissue back, and I stopped hearing the room at all.
It was a dried daisy. Yellow, or what was left of yellow. One petal gone. The stem had turned brown and brittle with time, and the whole flower had been pressed nearly flat.
I knew exactly where it came from.
My hand went over my mouth. "Oh, Nathan."
And just like that the auditorium was gone.
It was a Saturday in April. Claire had been signed out of St. Agnes for a few hours — she'd spent the whole week before that complaining about the food, the walls, the way everyone talked to her in the careful voice. She wanted to do something that felt normal.
So I took her shopping.
Graduation was still months off, but she'd made me promise we'd go find her dress before she felt any worse.
"Nothing sad," she told me in the car. "No gray. No 'tasteful.' I want a color you can see from space."
"You haven't even looked yet."
"Don't need to."
Nathan came along and made a show of being bored in a chair by the mirrors.
Claire pulled maybe three things off the rack before she found the red one. She went into the fitting room, and when she came out, she was smiling — not the tired smile she'd learned to hand doctors and nervous aunts. The real one. She turned a full circle in front of the mirror.
"This is the one."
Nathan looked up. "You look like a fire truck."
She whipped the price tag at his head. "You have no taste and you never did."
We bought the dress.
On the way back to the hospital she asked me to pull over by the little garden at the entrance. There were yellow daisies coming up along the walk. She leaned down and picked one.
"Pretty sure you're not allowed to do that," I said.
She grinned at me over her shoulder. "So arrest me."
That night, from her hospital bed, she pressed the flower flat inside a paperback. And I forgot all about it.
Until my son pulled it out of his pocket in a room full of people laughing at him.
My hands were shaking. "Where did you get this?"
He looked down at it in his palm. "Claire gave it to me."
"What?"
The row of mothers next to me had stopped giggling. So had the kids standing near the aisle.
Nathan lifted another fold of tissue. Underneath was a folded note. I saw my daughter's handwriting on it and my chest caved in.
"She gave me this three days before she died," he said, and his voice wobbled.
"You never told me."
"She made me promise."
May you like
People were turning around in their seats now. The phones were still up — but nobody was laughing into them anymore.
Down front, Dr. Whitfield stood at the edge of the stage, watching us, not moving.
