The Slap At The Reunion

Donna and I went to school together, and she had done my Tom’s funeral loan paperwork without charging me a fee she was supposed to, so we understood each other. I told her I wanted to know where my brother stood. She was not supposed to tell me and she told me anyway, because this is a small town and the rules bend when the people are good. Wade was four payments behind on the farm. The bank had already sent the first letter, the polite one. The second letter, the one that uses the word foreclosure, was going to go out in thirty days unless something changed.

I sat in Donna’s little office with the fake plant and the calendar from the funeral home, and I thought about my daddy clearing that ground with a borrowed dozer and a mule, and I thought about the hill where we buried him looking out over that same hay, and I did the only arithmetic that mattered. Tom’s life insurance had left me careful but not rich. The house was mine free and clear. The business brought in enough. I was one woman and two children who did not need much and had already learned to need even less.

I told Donna I would cover it. All of it. The four back payments and then the note going forward, every first of the month, until Wade was back on his feet.

And I told her the one condition. Wade could never know it was me. Not him, and not Sherry, and above all not Sherry.

I knew my brother. If he found out his big sister, the widow, the one who could not have children, was keeping his farm alive, it would break something in him that his back had not already broken. A man like Wade needs to believe he is the one holding the roof up. And Sherry, Sherry would have turned it into a weapon somehow, the way she turned everything, or she would have been so ashamed she would have made the whole family pay for her shame. I had watched her do it before.

So we set it up quiet. Donna coded it on their account as an anonymous hardship adjustment, which was a thing the bank did sometimes in those years for farm families, so it did not even look strange. The money came out of my account the last day of every month and went in before the first. Wade thought the bank had worked with him. Sherry thought Wade had worked it out. Everybody got to keep their pride, and the farm kept standing, and I never said one word.

I did it for two years and four months. I did it the whole time Sherry was telling people at church that I was just lonely and had taken in those poor foster children to fill the hole, bless my heart. I did it the whole time she sat me at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving, forty-two years old, because the grown table was full. I did it the Christmas she gave my Abby a secondhand coat that was two sizes too small and gave her own boys new everything, and I smiled and said thank you and had Abby’s real coat already in the truck.