Chapter 15 - Everybody Fits
The pink dress had been hanging at Emmett’s house since the morning Margot tried to give it back.
He hadn’t donated it.
He hadn’t asked her to wear it.
He had simply put it where she could decide what it meant later.
On Family Night, she came down the stairs carrying one shoe.
“This buckle is being mean.”
Emmett knelt.
“Let me have a word with it.”
I stood in the doorway and watched him fasten it.
For a moment, I thought of the photograph from the wedding.
Then Margot put her hand on his head to steady herself, and the moment belonged to us again.
At school, she led us past paintings of rain clouds and clay bowls that leaned dangerously to one side.
She showed us a bean plant in a paper cup.
She made us admire it separately.
“Mine has three leaves.”
“An impressive operation,” I told her.
“You can’t touch.”
“Strict management.”
Emmett bumped my shoulder.
Margot smiled.
Her family drawing hung near the classroom door.
Three people stood outside a house under a crooked sun.
In one window, she had drawn a woman with brown hair inside a smaller square.
“That’s Mommy’s picture,” she explained.
“I see it,” Emmett said.
Nobody asked her to add anyone.
Nobody asked her to take anyone away.
When we reached the paper garden, another family was finishing.
Margot slowed down.
Her fingers slipped out of mine.
She stopped beside a chair.
I felt Saturday return so sharply that I almost reached for her.
Then Emmett turned.
He didn’t wave from across the room.
He walked back.
He knelt in front of his daughter, held out his hand, and waited.
“Ready?”
She studied him.
“Where do I stand?”
“Where would you like?”
She pointed between us.
“Right there.”
“Good spot.”
The photographer adjusted his camera while Margot took my hand and her father’s.
Then she looked up at me.
“Move closer, Grandpa.”
I did.
“Closer.”
My shoulder touched Emmett’s.
Margot grinned.
“Everybody fits.”
The camera flashed.
Later, we ate ice cream at Emmett’s kitchen table.
Margot got chocolate on the pink dress and panicked for half a second.
“It washes,” her father said.
She went back to eating.
Such a small thing.
Such a huge one.
When she was asleep, Emmett walked me to the porch.
“Thank you for loving her enough to say something,” he said.
“I wish I’d said it sooner. And privately.”
“Me too.”
We let both truths stand.
“You came back for her tonight,” I said.
He glanced toward the stairs.
“I’m going to keep doing that.”
When the photograph arrived, he ordered three copies.
One for his hallway.
One for my living room.
One for Margot’s bedside table, next to her mother.
In it, I look older than I like.
Emmett’s tie is crooked.
Margot is laughing too hard to look straight at the camera.
I wouldn’t change a thing.
The day we put it in the frame, she studied it for a long time.
Then she turned to a fresh page in her drawing pad.
May you like
“Next picture,” she announced, “I’m picking where we stand.”
THE END
