…she’ll never forgive me.”
The photographer closed the laptop. “I’m not here to judge,” she said. “I just couldn’t give you these photos without you knowing what was in them.”
After she left, I sat at my kitchen table with the laptop open for two hours. Then I called my daughter, Emma, and asked her to come over alone.
She walked in, saw the photograph of the woman in the black dress on the screen, and sat down very slowly.
“Her name is Jordan,” Emma said. “We’ve been together for six years. We got married at the courthouse last spring.”
The groom, Nathan, was her best friend since kindergarten. He was gay too. His family was even stricter than ours. They had agreed to have a big church wedding so that both families would finally stop asking questions. They had been planning to live in the same building, in separate apartments, for as long as they needed to.
Jordan had been at the wedding as a “friend from work.” She had held the rings. She’d whispered “I love you” in Emma’s ear before Emma walked down the aisle to marry someone else.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
Emma looked at me with an expression I’d never seen. “Mom. You said at Thanksgiving three years ago that you’d rather I never married than marry a woman.”
I remembered saying it. I’d said it during an argument about a TV show. I hadn’t meant it the way she heard it. But she heard it, and she had been carrying it ever since.
I don’t remember everything I said in the next hour. I remember crying. I remember apologizing. I remember asking to meet Jordan properly.
Jordan came to dinner the next Sunday. She was nervous and kind and very funny. She brought me flowers. Nathan came too, and his partner, Leo.
Emma and Nathan had their church marriage annulled quietly. Last summer, Emma and Jordan had a second wedding in my backyard. This time, I was the one who held the rings. The same photographer took the pictures. She said they were the best ones she’s ever taken.
