The Slap At The Reunion

“Don’t call her Mama,” Sherry said again, louder, and now a few heads turned. “She’s not your mama. Your mama is somebody else, somewhere, and this one here just took you in like a stray because she couldn’t make her own.”

I stood up. I remember putting my body a little between Sherry and my girl, the way you do without thinking. I kept my voice as low and even as I could, the voice I used on Micah that whole first year. I said, “Sherry. Not here. Not in front of the kids.”

“Oh, in front of the kids,” she said, and her voice climbed, and now the whole backyard was turning, the horseshoes stopping, the men by the smoker going still. “You want to talk about in front of the kids. You walk in here with your three casseroles and your sad little story and everybody just falls all over poor Dana, the saint, the widow, took in those children out of the goodness of her heart. You are not a mother, Dana. You bought a family because God looked at you and said no.”

And I said the only true thing I had. I said, “I am their mother.”

And she slapped me.

I told you about the sound already. I told you about the quiet after. Let me tell you what happened in the quiet, because this is the part that matters, this is the part I need you to understand. This is the part that was not about me at all.

My brother Wade stood up.

He had been sitting in a lawn chair by the smoker with a plate on his knee, favoring his back the way he still did, not saying much, which was Wade all over. And when Sherry’s hand came across my face, he stood up so fast the plate went off his knee and into the grass, potato salad and all, and he did not even look at it.

“Sherry,” he said.

She was still breathing hard. “She started it,” Sherry said. “She needs to learn her place in this family, Wade, somebody’s got to say it.”

“Her place in this family,” Wade said.

And something in the way he said it made the whole yard hold still. Because Wade never raised his voice. In forty-three years I had maybe heard my brother raise his voice twice. He walked around the table, slow, with that hitch in his step, and he stood next to me, and he looked at his wife across the deviled eggs.

“You want to talk about this family,” Wade said. “Alright. Let’s talk about it in front of everybody, since that’s how you wanted to do it.”

“Wade,” she said, and something flickered in her face, because she did not know where he was going and Sherry did not like not knowing.