My Family Said My Wedding Was Too Far but Traveled for My Sister Until Weeks Later My Father Needed Something From Me

I knew right then. I knew the way you know something you have always known and have simply been refusing to say out loud. I told her I would see her on the twenty-second and ended the call before she could hear my voice crack.

Four days later my father called me at my office, which he had never done before. The drive was hard on your mother’s sciatica, he said. The doctor said she shouldn’t sit in a car. It’s more like forty-five minutes with traffic.

There is no traffic between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City on a Saturday afternoon, I told him. I have driven it a