The Woman Who Ordered Me Off

The Birthday Present

Call it a mean streak if you want. I prefer to call it patience. She had spent an afternoon performing for a crowd. I was going to let the performance reach its natural end.

About an hour later, the party turned toward the cake, the way parties do. The DJ said something into his microphone and the crowd gathered around the picnic table. Somebody produced a lighter. Candles went into the top layer of that white cake, six of them, one for each decade. Phones came out, held up to record. She adjusted her tiara, took up the cake knife, and stood there in the center of my pasture with the low sun behind her while forty people sang happy birthday to her by name. Her name, I would learn from Sheriff Dale’s report, was Sharon.

They got to the end of the song. They cheered. She closed her eyes to make her wish.

That is when I got off the tailgate.

I told the boys to walk with me, one on each side, and the three of us crossed the field together, slow and easy, in no hurry at all. The singing had already ended, but the noise of the crowd fell off as people saw us coming, the same way the music had stopped an hour before. By the time we reached the picnic table you could hear the creek.

Sharon opened her eyes. She saw me standing there with a boy on each side. The smile came off her face like it had been wiped with a rag.

“I told you to leave,” she said, and her voice had lost some of its steel. “I am calling the police. I mean it.”

“You don’t need to call anybody,” I said. I kept my voice low and even, the way you talk to spooked cattle. “They are already on the way. My caretaker called them this morning. Right after you laughed in his face.”

Something flickered in her eyes then. The first crack in all that certainty.

I reached into the back pocket of my jeans and took out the folded envelope I had gone back to the truck for while she was lighting her candles. Inside it was the deed to those forty acres, the survey with the property lines drawn plain, and the tax receipt from that very spring with my name printed on the top. I had grabbed the whole file out of the glove box, where I keep it every June, because Roy always says a man should carry his papers when he goes to his own land, and I always thought he was being dramatic. Not that afternoon.