And damn was he a good-looking kid. He had my coloring but his father’s height and aquamarine eyes. His hair was like mine and leaned toward a sandy, reddish brown in the summer. He was thirty-two years old. He’d been a grown man for a long time, but as I watched him make his way down the aisle, I saw none of my little boy in him.

That melancholy feeling that came over me yesterday afternoon swelled in me again as he came to stand over me. “You look gorgeous, ma,” he whispered, then leaned in to kiss me on the cheek.

He didn’t even smell like my boy anymore. I gave him a wobbly smile when he pulled away.

“Don’t cry, mama. It’s a happy day.”

“I know,” I whispered hoarsely. So why did I feel this loss so keenly? “I’m just so happy for you,” I said, patting his cheek. “She’s beautiful, and I know that the two of you will be happy together.”

My boy grinned and loped to his place near the pastor. Tommy followed, his gaze focused on me.

“You okay?” he mouthed, then gestured toward his pocket, where I knew he probably had another one of those handkerchiefs.

I gave him a polite smile and nodded. He returned the nod and added a wink for good measure. A wink delivered with a look that said he was looking forward to our appointment tonight.

But Jolene’s words rang in my ears too. And they stuck with me all the way through the twenty-one-minute ceremony. My son blubbered through his vows — most of which he forgot — and ended inelegantly with, “I love you so much. I love everything about you. The way you move. The way you speak. The way you eat.” That got him lots of laughs, but it made me wonder if anyone had ever felt that way about me? Had Shannon?

They kissed — boy, did they kiss. I couldn’t remember Jared ever kissing someone the way he kissed his new wife in front of me. It made that old adage seem even more true. A son’s a son ‘til he takes a wife, but a daughter is a daughter all her life.

I had no daughters. Jared was my only son. And I was losing him to a beauty in a frothy white dress with a hard Northern accent and a look for him like he hung the moon. I wanted to be happy for them — I was happy for them. But I couldn’t help feeling sad for myself.