Pastor Halvorsen had to take off his glasses and wipe them on his robe before he could go on.
And Dad. Dad sat there in his wheelchair with his chin up, breathing hard, still holding my hand. Half his face was smiling.
Then I looked at the front pew.
Connie.
She was sitting with both hands pressed flat over her mouth. Her eyes were closed. Tears were streaming down her face. Running down her cheeks and off her chin and onto her sage green dress, leaving dark spots.
Connie Lindahl, who never cried, was crying so hard her whole body shook.
And her lips were moving. Silently. Behind her hands. I could see them through her fingers.
Her mother and I do.
She was saying it with him. Word for word. Like she’d heard it a thousand times. Like she’d practiced it.
That was when I understood.
Every Tuesday. Every single Tuesday for five months. Sixty miles each way. Seven in the morning until four in the afternoon. Speech therapy at nine.
I never asked what they worked on.
They worked on this.
Four words. Her mother and I do. My father sat in a little room at the Sanford rehab clinic on Broadway, every Tuesday, with a speech therapist and a mirror and my stepmother, practicing four words. Over and over. Week after week. Month after month.
So he could give me away.
And Connie. Connie drove him there. And sat with him. And helped him practice. Helped him practice saying my mother’s name. Not hers. My mother’s. Linda’s. The first wife. The one whose spice cabinet she alphabetized. The one whose lilacs she never cut back.
She helped my father practice giving me away for both of them. Him and Mom.
And she never said a word.
At the rehearsal, when she shook her head at him. When she took him home early.
She wasn’t embarrassed of him. Jake was right.
She was scared. Scared he’d use the words up. Scared that if he tried on Friday and failed, in front of everybody, he’d lose his nerve. Scared he’d only have it in him once.
She was saving them. For this. For me.
Pastor Halvorsen put his glasses back on. He cleared his throat twice.
“Thank you, Gene,” he said softly.
Dad nodded once. Then he did something nobody expected. He let go of my hand. Slowly. Finger by finger.
He reached over with his good hand and took Jake’s hand. Jake knelt down beside the wheelchair so Dad could reach him. Dad held Jake’s hand for a moment. Then he put my hand in Jake’s. He folded our fingers together with his own.
He patted them twice.
Tap. Tap.
Yes.
Chapter Ten: The Ring
I don’t remember much of the rest of the ceremony. I know I said “I do.” I know Jake said it even louder than he did at the rehearsal. I know Shelby took two hundred pictures and that, in almost every single one, I’m crying.
I remember Pastor Halvorsen said, “You may kiss the bride,” and Jake kissed me so hard my veil fell off. I remember the bell ringing in the tower when we came out the doors. I remember old Mr. Svoboda honking the horn on his John Deere.
What I remember most is what happened afterward.
The reception was at the Harlow Community Center. Tables with white paper tablecloths and mason jars full of sunflowers. Travis’s beef, roasted all morning by the Lutheran church women. Mashed potatoes. Green bean hotdish. Twenty-two pans of bars, guarded by Aunt Darla with a serving spatula like a sword.
Dad sat at the head table next to me. He was exhausted. He fell asleep in his wheelchair twice during dinner, and both times somebody gently put a napkin under his chin.
But he was smiling. Even asleep.
Around eight o’clock, when the dancing started, I went looking for Connie.
I found her outside on the back steps of the community center. Alone. Sitting on the concrete in her sage green dress with her shoes off, looking out at the grain elevator in the distance, its lights blinking red against the dark.
I sat down next to her. My dress pooled on the step.
Neither of us said anything for a while. Inside, Cody the DJ was playing “Friends in Low Places,” and a hundred people were shouting along.
“Every Tuesday,” I said finally.
Connie nodded. She didn’t look at me.
“Since June,” she said. “He asked me. In May. The day you came and asked if he’d give you away. After you left, he tapped on the table. And then he pointed at the calendar. At the therapy appointments. And then he pointed at your picture on the fridge.”
She took a breath.
“Took me ten minutes to figure out what he meant,” she said. “Then he said ‘Linda.’ Just like that. Clear as anything. First time he’d said her name since January.”
“And you helped him.”
“His speech therapist, Brianna, said it was too ambitious. Four words. She said we should aim for one. Maybe ‘I do.’” Connie laughed a little through her tears. “Gene wouldn’t have it. He tapped on the table so hard he knocked over her pencil cup. Four words or nothing.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because he might not have been able to do it,” she said simply. “And I didn’t want you walking down that aisle expecting something that didn’t come. I couldn’t stand the thought of it. Him trying and failing in front of you. In front of everybody. It would have broken him, Haley. And I think it would have broken you.”
She turned and looked at me for the first time.
“So I said nothing,” she said. “And I let you think I didn’t want him there. I figured you’d hate me either way. Better you hate me for that than for getting your hopes up.”
I looked down at her left hand. Resting on her knee. Bare.
“I saw you,” I said quietly. “In Fargo. In August. Coming out of the pawn shop on 13th Avenue.”
Connie went very still.
“You sold your rings,” I said.
She didn’t answer for a long time. When she finally did, her voice was very small.
“Speech therapy is a hundred and eighty dollars a session,” she said. “Medicare covers some of it. But after a certain number of visits in a year, it stops. There’s a cap. They make you fill out forms to justify more, and you wait, and sometimes they say no.” She shook her head. “We hit it in July. I applied for an exception. They denied it in August.”
“So you paid for it.”
“Ten more sessions,” she said. “To get to the wedding. Eighteen hundred dollars.” She looked down at her bare hand. “Fargo Gold and Loan gave me two thousand for the set.”
I couldn’t speak. I just sat there on the back steps of the community center in my wedding dress, staring at her hand.
“Haley,” Connie said. “There’s something else. About the money. The five thousand.”
“You don’t have to…”
“Yes, I do.” She took a breath. “He remembered.”
My heart stopped.
“He always remembered,” she said. “He’s remembered every day since January. He tries to tell me. He points at your picture. He says ‘Hal’ and then he says ‘money’ and then he gets so angry he cries. Because he can’t make the rest of the words come.”
“But you said…”
“I know what I said.” Her voice broke. “I lied to you, honey. At the kitchen table. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Chapter Eleven: Where the Money Went
She told me everything on those back steps.
The stroke happened on January 14th. Dad was in the ICU at Sanford for nine days. Then a rehab hospital for twenty-one days. Then home, with a home health nurse three times a week.
Medicare covered a lot of it. But not everything. There were deductibles. Copays. The ambulance. The twenty percent of every single doctor visit and every MRI and every therapy session.
And the rehab hospital. Medicare only covers the first twenty days in full. After that, there’s a daily copay. Over two hundred dollars a day.
“By April,” Connie said, “we’d paid eleven thousand dollars out of pocket. And that pile on the kitchen table, that was the next eight thousand.”
“The five thousand Gene put away for you,” she said. “It was in a savings account at Bremer Bank. Separate from everything else. He opened it the week your mom died. He put fifty dollars in it every month for fifteen years. Never touched it once.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“It’s gone, Haley,” she said. “I had to use it. In March. For the rehab hospital bill. I didn’t have any other choice. It was that or lose the house.”
I closed my eyes.
“And I went to Neil Hagen,” she said. “In Mayville. To ask him if I could give you what was left of anything. Even a thousand. And he told me about the Medicaid lookback. He said if Gene ever has to go into a nursing home, and he might, honey, he might, any gift I make from his money could cost him months of care. He said I couldn’t risk it. Not legally. Not as his agent.”
“Neil told me that too,” I whispered. “When I called him.”
Connie looked at me sharply. “You called Neil?”
“In July.” I felt my face get hot. “After you bought the van. I thought you were spending Dad’s money on yourself.”
She didn’t get angry. She just nodded slowly, like it made sense.
“The van,” she said, “was mine. My money. From my 401(k), from twenty years at the Extension Office. I took it out early. Paid the penalty and the taxes. Because I couldn’t lift him into the Buick anymore, Haley. I dropped him in February. In the church parking lot. He hit his head on the door frame and I had to call two men from the choir to help me get him up off the ice.”
She shook her head.
“I wasn’t going to let that happen again,” she said. “Not ever.”
“And the kitchen table,” I said. “In April. Why did you tell me he didn’t remember? Why didn’t you just tell me the truth? That the money was gone?”
Connie was quiet for a long time. Inside, Cody was playing “Amazed,” and I could hear people slow dancing, their boots shuffling on the old wood floor.
“Because he was in the next room,” she said. “Listening. And he can hear everything. His mind is all there, Haley. All of it. It’s just locked in.”
She pressed her fingers against her eyes.
“If I’d told you the money was gone, he’d have heard me. He’d have heard me tell his daughter that the money he saved for fifteen years, fifty dollars at a time, the money he promised her in the driveway, got spent on his hospital bills. Because of him. Because he got sick.” Her voice cracked in half. “It would have killed him. I mean it. It would have killed something in him that the stroke didn’t.”
“So you said he forgot.”
“So I said he forgot,” Connie said. “I’d rather you think he forgot than think he failed you. He’s been trying so hard, Haley. Every single day. I couldn’t take that from him too.”
I sat there on the back steps of the Harlow Community Center in my two-hundred-and-eighty-dollar dress, with my mother’s veil in my lap.
I thought about the kitchen table. Connie folding her hands on top of the bills. I have to guard every dollar.
I thought she meant from me.
She meant for him.
I reached over and took her left hand. Her bare one. I held it in both of mine.
It was the first time in eleven years I’d ever held my stepmother’s hand.
“Connie,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?”
“For the courthouse. When I wore black. For the spice cabinet. For every Christmas I didn’t call. For thinking you were stealing from him.” My voice was shaking. “You’ve been taking care of my dad. All by yourself. And I’ve been sitting there every Sunday, eating your chicken and dumplings and thinking the worst of you.”
She squeezed my hand.
“You loved your mother,” Connie said simply. “And I was in her chair. I understood that. I always understood that.”
She looked out at the blinking red lights on the grain elevator.
“I never wanted to replace her, honey,” she said. “I just wanted to sit next to her place. And keep it warm.”
Chapter Twelve: Tap Twice
Jake found us out there twenty minutes later.
He came out the back door holding two paper plates, one in each hand. Each plate had a Scotcheroo on it.
“Aunt Darla says these are the last two,” he said. “She says if anybody else asks, they’re for the bride’s family.”
He handed one to me. He handed the other one to Connie.
Connie looked up at him. Then at the bar. Then at me.
“Bride’s family,” she repeated softly.
“That’s what she said,” Jake said, and went back inside.
We sat there and ate our Scotcheroos on the back steps, Connie and me. We didn’t say much. We didn’t need to.
When we went back in, Cody was playing “My Girl.” The father-daughter song. I’d told him to skip it. I’d told him Dad couldn’t dance.
But Dad was sitting at the edge of the dance floor in his wheelchair. And when he saw me come through the door, he raised his good hand. And he crooked one finger.
Come here.
I went out on that dance floor in front of a hundred and fifty people. I took Dad’s good hand. And I held it, and I swayed back and forth in front of his wheelchair while the Temptations sang.
That was our dance. Me swaying. Him holding on. His half smile. My mother’s veil back on my head.
Halfway through the song, Dad let go of my hand. He looked over at the edge of the dance floor, where Connie was standing alone in her sage dress.
He raised his finger again. He crooked it at her.
Come here.
Connie shook her head. She put her hand on her chest. Me? No.
Dad tapped twice on his armrest.
Tap. Tap.
Connie came out onto the dance floor.
She stood on the other side of Dad’s wheelchair. He took her hand in his. Then he reached over with that same hand, slowly, so slowly, and took mine too. And he held both of our hands together on the armrest in his one good hand.
And the three of us stayed like that until the song ended.
That was a year ago.
Dad is still in his wheelchair. He probably always will be. But he can say about thirty words now. Brianna says it’s a miracle. Dad says it’s “stubborn.” That’s one of his thirty.
Jake and I bought a house in Harlow in the spring. Two bedrooms, a big yard, five minutes from Dad and Connie. We had the down payment because we didn’t spend all of our savings on the wedding after all. Aunt Marlene paid for the beef. She told nobody until the bill came. “Gene would’ve done it,” she said. “So I did.”
Every Tuesday, I drive Dad to Fargo for therapy now. Connie does Thursdays. We switch off.
Last Christmas, Connie gave me a small box.
It was wrapped in plain brown paper with a red ribbon. Inside was a bank passbook from Bremer Bank. A savings account. In my name. And Dad’s.
It had one deposit. Fifty dollars. Made in December.
And a note card, in Connie’s neat schoolteacher handwriting, with an addition at the bottom in big, shaky, left-handed letters.
Fifty dollars a month. Every month. Started over. Not from Gene’s money. From mine. Neil Hagen says that’s allowed.
Under that, in letters so big and crooked they took up half the card:
FOR HAL. LOVE DAD.
I went over to their house that night. Christmas night. The lilacs along the north side of the house were bare sticks, buried in snow.
Connie was in the kitchen making coffee. Dad was in his recliner with the Christmas lights on, half asleep.
I knelt down beside his chair. I held up the passbook.
“Dad,” I said. “You didn’t have to do this.”
He opened his eyes. He looked at the passbook. Then he looked at me.
He said one of his thirty words. Slow and thick. But clear.
“Promised.”
I put my head down on the arm of his recliner and cried.
He put his good hand on top of my head. It was heavy and warm and it smelled like Old Spice.
Behind me, I heard Connie set two cups of coffee on the end table. I heard her sit down in her chair across the room. I heard her pick up her knitting.
I looked up. She was watching us over the top of her reading glasses. Her left hand was resting on her knitting.
On her fourth finger, there was a ring. A thin gold band. Plain. No diamond.
“Gene bought it at Ellingson’s,” she said, when she saw me looking. “In November. He made me drive him. Wouldn’t tell me why. Pointed at the case and tapped twice.”
She smiled. A real smile. I’d never seen her smile like that before.
“Fourteen karat,” she said. “Sixty-nine dollars. From the money in his wallet.”
Dad’s hand was still resting on my head.
I reached up and took it. His good hand. I held it in both of mine.
Then I tapped twice on the back of it.
Tap. Tap.
He squeezed my fingers. And he didn’t let go.
