The Slap At The Reunion

I am not telling you this to sound like a saint. I am telling you because you need to understand what was in that backyard the day she hit me. There was a woman who thought she was better than me, standing on ground I was paying for, raising her hand to the one person who had kept it under her feet.

The reunion was Mama’s idea. Pruett family reunion, second Saturday in September, the way we had done it when Daddy was alive, before everybody scattered and got too busy and too mad at each other. Mama is seventy-eight and she wanted the whole family on the home place one more time while she could still cook for them. So we did it in Wade and Sherry’s backyard, because that was the farm, that was the home place, that was where the tables went under the big hackberry tree the way they always had.

I came early to help Mama with the food. Sherry came out of the house in that white blouse and looked at the three casseroles I had carried in and said, “Oh, you didn’t have to. We’ve got plenty.” Which in Sherry language meant put them in the kitchen where nobody will see you brought anything. I put them in the kitchen. Micah helped me set up the folding tables, fourteen years old now and tall as me, serious the way he had always been. Abby ran off with the little cousins to the tire swing, nine years old and finally, finally the kind of loud happy child that two kitchen trash bags do not usually grow into.

It was a good afternoon for a while. That is the part that still sits strange with me. For three hours it was a good day. Uncle Ray brought his horseshoes. Somebody’s teenager had a speaker going. The men stood around Wade’s smoker lying about fish. Mama held court in the shade and let the great-nieces braid her hair. I sat with my cousin Lynette and we laughed about the time our granddaddy drove the church van into the Caney Fork, and for a little while I forgot I was tired, forgot I was the one who paid for the roof over it all, and just felt like family under a tree.

It turned on something small. It always does.

Abby came running up from the tire swing with grass in her hair and her knees green, breathless and happy, and she grabbed my arm and said, “Mama, Mama, Cousin Dylan says I can’t swing because I’m not real family, tell him Mama.”

I did not even have time to answer her.

Sherry was right there. She had come up behind with a tray of deviled eggs, and she set that tray down on the table hard enough to rattle it, and she said, “Don’t call her that.”

The yard did not go quiet yet. People were still talking. Abby looked up at Sherry, confused, still holding my arm.