My name is Denise Parker. I am seventy-two years old, a widow, and until that evening I had still been foolish enough to believe that love, if given long enough and generously enough, would eventually be returned. There was one small detail my son Richard and his wife Susan had forgotten when they decided to stop me at the door of my own granddaughter’s wedding: I was the one who had paid for the entire thing.
I had spent the whole morning getting ready. A granddaughter’s wedding is the kind of day a grandmother carries in her heart for years before it arrives. Clara was my oldest grandchild, the first baby I had ever held long enough to feel the future pressing against my chest.
I still remembered changing her diapers and teaching her how to stir rice pudding without scorching the milk, laughing when she got cinnamon on her nose. Robert, my late husband, had loved rice pudding, and Clara used to call it Grandpa’s dessert when she was little. Now she was getting married, and I wanted to look the way a grandmother should look on a day like that.
Proud, elegant, happy, and steady. I chose a pink silk dress I had saved for years for some truly special occasion. I fastened my mother’s pearl necklace at my throat and put on the French perfume I reserved for holidays and anniversaries.
When I stood in front of the mirror, I did not see an old woman fading into the background. I saw someone who had lived, built, survived, loved, and earned her place in the front row of life. For six months, my life had revolved around that wedding.
Richard and Susan came to my apartment nearly every week, sitting on my velvet sofa with coffee I had made, speaking in the soft careful voices people use when they want something large and are taking their time arriving at it. You know, Mom, times are tough these days. And Susan, with that particular smile she wore whenever money was near, would add that they just wanted Clara to have her dream wedding.
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