Hannah put the microphone down. She came around the head table. She knelt down next to my chair in her beautiful white dress, right there on the floor of that old barn, and she put her arms around me.
I held her the way I held her when she had strep throat. The way I held her when her first boyfriend broke her heart. The way I held her when she was six years old and asked me if I was going to leave too.
“I’m sorry,” she cried into my shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Mom.”
“Shh,” I said. “Shh. It’s okay. You didn’t know.”
“I should have known. I should have known it was you. It was always you. You were always the one at the mailbox.”
Somewhere behind us, people were clapping. People were crying. I heard Joanne blow her nose so loudly that it echoed off the rafters.
And then I heard a chair scrape back hard against the floor.
I looked up.
Crystal was standing at her table near the back. Her face was white. Her eyes were wet. She grabbed her little champagne purse and walked out of the barn through the side door without saying a word to anyone.
Nobody stopped her.
The DJ, a young man who clearly had no idea what to do, finally cleared his throat into his microphone.
“Uh,” he said. “So. Next up was going to be the mother-son dance and the father-daughter dance. But, uh…” He looked at his paper, then back at Hannah. “I’m getting the feeling there might be a change?”
Hannah stood up. She wiped her face. Her mascara was everywhere. She didn’t care.
“Do you have ‘You Are My Sunshine’?” she asked.
The DJ blinked. “Uh, yeah. I think so.”
“Play that,” Hannah said. She held out her hand to me. “Dance with me, Mom?”
That was the song I sang to her the night she had strep throat. The first one. Before I ran out of songs and started making them up.
I took her hand.
We danced in the middle of that old barn, under the white lights, in front of two hundred people. I’m not a good dancer. Neither is Hannah. We mostly just swayed back and forth and cried and laughed and stepped on each other’s feet.
Halfway through the song, Mark came out on the dance floor and wrapped his arms around both of us. Then Owen came out and joined in. And then Joanne, and Kelsey, and Owen’s mother, and Mrs. Patterson, until there was a big, messy, crying clump of people swaying in the middle of the dance floor to a song about sunshine.
When the song ended, Hannah kissed my cheek.
“I need to tell you the rest,” she said. “But not here. Can we go somewhere?”
We went to the little bridal room at the back of the barn. Hannah closed the door. She sat down on a white velvet couch and pulled me down next to her.
“She told me she sent them,” Hannah said.
I looked at her.
“The first week she came back,” Hannah said. “I showed her the shoebox. I was so happy. I said, ‘Look, I kept every single one.’ And she looked at them, and she got all teary, and she said, ‘Oh, baby. I can’t believe you kept them all.’”
I closed my eyes.
“She knew,” Hannah said. “She had to know. She’d never sent me a single thing. But she looked right at me and let me think she did. And then she started telling me those stories. About how you wouldn’t let her in the house. About how you hung up on her.”
“Hannah…”
“I believed her,” Hannah said. “God help me, I believed her. Because why would somebody who sent me eleven years of birthday cards lie to me? And I started thinking, maybe Laura’s been jealous this whole time. Maybe Laura kept her away from me.” She shook her head. “And all year I couldn’t look at you. I kept thinking, how could she do that to me? How could she keep my mother away?”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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