The scuff mark on the baseboard was Emma’s doing. She had practiced her flower girl walk so many times, down our narrow hallway and back, that the paint at the far end had worn away to a faint gray smear where she pivoted. Four months of practice.
She had the pace memorized, the measured step, the chin-up posture she had developed after watching a YouTube video of a flower girl at some stranger’s wedding and deciding that was the correct form. On the morning of my brother’s rehearsal dinner, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror holding one hair clip in each palm — tiny white enamel daisies in one hand, miniature silver stars in the other — with the solemn gravity of someone making a consequential decision. “The daisies,” she finally announced.
“Perfect choice,” I said, and pinned them into her hair. She absorbed this the way children absorb certainty when it comes from someone they trust completely. Without question.
Without doubt. She had a job. She had practiced.
She was ready. My husband Derek had ironed his shirt the night before without being asked, aligned Emma’s patent leather shoes by the front door, and found a congratulatory card for my brother Ryan and his fiancée Madison entirely on his own initiative. When I stood in the kitchen frozen by last-minute anxiety, second-guessing whether I needed a hostess gift for an event I had spent weeks helping to coordinate, he put his hand on my back.
“You’ve poured enough of yourself into this,” he said. “Let’s just get in the car.”
The drive to the Hargrove Inn took forty minutes — a white-columned estate at the edge of a private lake, the kind of property that makes you want to whisper the moment your tires hit the gravel. Emma had her face pressed to the cold window the entire way, watching the highway dissolve into country roads.
“Is Uncle Ryan going to notice my daisy barrettes?” she asked. “He won’t be able to look at anything else,” I told her. She leaned back in her booster seat looking satisfied, and I felt that particular warmth that only comes from watching your child anticipate something untainted.
She knew nothing of family politics, nothing of whispers or calculated silences. She only knew she had a role and she had earned it. My phone vibrated as Derek pulled into the parking area.
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