The Slap At The Reunion

Then Abby tugged my shirt, and I looked down, and my little girl was looking up at me with her face all screwed up, trying to understand, and she said, “Mama, why is everybody not talking.”

And whatever softness I had for Sherry went right out of me, because that was my child, scared, in a yard full of grown people who had just let her hear she was not wanted. I knelt down in the grass so I was level with Abby’s face, and I did not whisper it, I said it at a regular voice so the whole quiet yard could hear a grown woman say it right, the way it should have been said an hour before.

“Everybody’s quiet,” I said, “because they just found out something kind. That’s all. You and your brother are my real family. There is not one thing in this world more real than you. Do you understand me, Abby? Nothing. You go on back to that swing and you tell Dylan your mama said you can swing all you want.”

Abby looked at me a second longer, the way she does when she is deciding whether to believe a thing. Then she nodded, and she ran, and halfway to the tire swing she was laughing again, because she is nine and the whole thing had already passed through her like weather. Micah had come up beside me by then. He did not say anything. He is not a boy who says things. He just put his hand on my shoulder, my fourteen-year-old boy, and left it there, and that was Micah telling me he had heard all of it and he was with me.

I stood back up. My cheek was still hot. I expect it was already starting to mark.

Mama came across that yard. Seventy-eight years old, moving slow, but she came all the way across it to where I stood, and she took my face in both her soft old hands, careful on the side that was red, and she looked at me with her eyes swimming and she said, loud enough, “You’ve got more mother in you than anybody standing in this yard.”

Then she turned around to the whole family and she said, “Now that’s enough standing around. The woman’s been carrying all of us. Somebody fix her a plate.”

And I will tell you, that broke it. People moved. Lynette started to cry and hug me. Uncle Ray put his hat back on and clapped Wade on the good shoulder. Somebody turned the music back up. The deviled eggs got passed around after all. Within ten minutes the backyard sounded almost like a reunion again, the way sound comes back into a room after a storm moves through, and I sat down in a lawn chair and let my cousin bring me a cold washcloth and a plate piled too high, and I let them make a fuss, which I am not good at, but I let them.

Sherry went in the house.