The Slap At The Reunion
“Three weeks ago I went down to the bank,” Wade said. He was not looking at her now. He was looking at the ground, and then at Mama, and then at me, like he was apologizing to the whole line of us at once. “I went down to Sparta Federal to see about refinancing the note, now that I’m back working, trying to get the rate down. And I sat with Donna Pike, and I thanked her for the way the bank carried us all through my accident. I said I didn’t know how we’d have kept the place without the bank being so good to us.”
He stopped. His jaw was working.
“And Donna got real quiet,” Wade said. “And she told me the bank didn’t carry us. She told me there wasn’t any hardship program. She told me somebody had been making our payment. Every single month. For over two years. Somebody who made her swear never to say who.”
Nobody in that backyard moved. I could hear the cicadas. I could hear the speaker still playing low from across the yard where some kid had wandered off and left it.
“I made her tell me,” Wade said. “I’m sorry, Dana. I know you didn’t want me to know. I made her tell me because I had to know who to thank, and I had a feeling, God help me, I had a feeling in my gut the whole drive over who it was going to be.”
He turned and looked at me then, my little brother, fifty-one years old with a ruined back and his eyes full, and he said it to the whole family, loud and plain, the way Sherry had wanted everything said loud and plain.
“It was Dana,” Wade said. “The woman you just slapped in my yard kept this farm. She kept the roof over my head and over your head and over my boys’ heads for two years and four months while I couldn’t lift a bale. The widow. The one you just told couldn’t make her own family. She’s the reason you’ve got a family to stand in front of right now.”
I have never heard a quiet like the one that came down on that backyard. Fifty people. Not a fork. Not a word. Mama had her hand over her mouth. Uncle Ray had taken his hat off, I do not know why, I think he just did not know what to do with his hands. And Sherry stood there in her white blouse with her hand that had hit me hanging at her side, and I watched the color go out of her face from the top down, like water running out of a glass.
“That’s not,” she started. “That’s not true. The bank.”
“Call Donna,” Wade said. “Go on. Call her right now. I’ve got her number.”
Sherry did not call Donna. Sherry looked around that yard at every face she had spent twenty years trying to impress, and she saw every single one of them looking back at her, and she understood all at once what she had done, and in front of who, and on whose dime. I almost felt sorry for her. I want to be honest with you about that. For one second, watching a person find out exactly how small she is in front of everyone she had tried to be big for, I almost felt sorry for her.