Fiction: The Strange Wedding Album

This is a story from my friend, Angela Best.
***
I asked my mother once, "What do you call it when you have those very bad dreams, even though you're wide awake?"

She said she didn't know what it was called, and furthermore she had no idea what I was talking about.

I suspect she was not being totally honest about the second part of that.

I remember a story she told Aunt Eula one time, when she thought I was asleep and couldn't hear. (Aunt Eula isn't my mother's sister, but I had to call her that name anyway. Which was okay, because I liked Aunt Eula.)

The story was about how when she was a little girl, she liked to sit with her mother (my Grandana) and go through her mother and father's wedding album. She said she'd sit there with Grandana, looking at all the pictures and memorizing them and asking questions, and that they would laugh and have a really good time.

Once, her father had to go away on a trip and was gone for something like two months. A few days before he was to get back, my mother got out the wedding album and sat on her mother's lap, with a cup of hot cocoa that smelled like winter smoke, and they looked through the pictures, same as always.

Except the groom in the pictures wasn't her father. He didn't even have a ballpark resemblance to him. At first, my mother laughed because she thought this was some sort of joke, and she asked where the real pictures of Daddy were. But Grandana just looked at her strange and told her to stop talking such nonsense. My mother grew more agitated, and started crying, telling Grandana to bring back the real pictures. That just made Grandana get fretful, and she told my mother real sharply to cut it out and behave, and then she put the wedding album away up high where she couldn't reach it.

My mother was very upset about all this, but she couldn't talk to Grandana about it. She kept on wanting her Daddy to get back home, so that he would make everything alright. And finally, one night the door opened and she heard a voice saying, "Daddy's back," and she threw down her puzzle book and ran to find him, anxious to see if it was her Daddy or the father in the wedding album.

When she got to the door, her mother was already in his arms, giving him a big kiss, so she couldn't see his face. But then she pulled away and my mother looked right in his eyes and she could see that it definitely was not the father in the wedding album.

But it also wasn't her Daddy.

"No hug for your old Dad?" she heard this unexpected third father say and she found herself being drawn into his embrace as he alternated kisses between her and Grandana. His arms were warm and his touch was gentle, but my mother's face remained frozen. Not in fear, nor even despair, but just in resignation.

Aunt Eula asked her what happened, and she just shrugged. "What could happen?" she said. "I pretended and I accepted and I grew up."

Then Aunt Eula asked if she ever looked at the wedding album after that, and my mother just shrugged again. "What'd be the use?" she asked, and then I could hear her clearing the coffee cups away.

I didn't buy that. I think my mother wanted to look but was scared to. I used to think it was because, what if she looked and the groom wasn't any of these men?

What if there was a fourth one?

But lately I think it wasn't that.

Lately I think what she was really afraid of was who she might find staring out at her from the wedding dress instead.