The Hook by the Back Door
My father was supposed to walk me down the aisle. He spent an entire year rehearsing for it, which was something to see from a man who had never in his life done anything at less than full speed. He practiced in the hallway of his little house in Moore, Oklahoma, with a broom standing in for me, counting under his breath and trying to slow his long legs down to a wedding march.
“Step, together,” he would mutter. “Step, together. Lord, Rae, this is harder than riding through a hailstorm.”
He died in March, eleven weeks before the wedding. Pancreatic cancer, found too late, the way it almost always is. He was sixty-one years old. By the end he weighed a hundred and forty pounds and couldn’t walk to the mailbox, but every single evening he still had me prop him up in the hallway with the broom so he could practice his steps. He’d make it four or five before he had to sit down, and then he’d look up at me from his chair, out of breath, and grin.
“I’ll get it,” he said. “I’ve got till June.”
He didn’t have till June.
So I found a way to bring him with me anyway. On the morning of my wedding, after my maid of honor had laced me into my gown and pinned my veil and stepped back to cry, I drove to Dad’s empty house in Moore and walked through it alone. His leather vest was still hanging on the hook beside the back door, where he’d hung it every night for thirty-five years. In the biker world they call it a cut. It still carried the smell of motor oil and Marlboros and the cinnamon gum he chewed when he was trying to quit, which was always.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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