The Slap At The Reunion

I need to tell you how it ended with her, because a story is not finished until you say what happened to everybody, and I have had enough people in my life disappear without an ending.

She stayed in the house the rest of the reunion. Through the window I could see her at the kitchen sink, where she had put my casseroles so nobody would see them, washing dishes alone while her whole family laughed in the yard. I thought about Tom. I thought about all the dishes I had washed alone in that same kind of kitchen while the company sat. I did not go gloat. I want you to know I did not go in there and say one word to her, because the thing I had learned in nine years of empty cradles and one year of a boy breaking my dishes is that you do not win by making another person as small as they tried to make you. You just make two small people.

Wade and Sherry are still married, as far as I know how to say still. He made her write me a letter. I did not ask him to. He told me later, driving me out to the truck with Micah carrying the empty casserole dishes, that he could not look at the farm anymore without knowing what it cost me and what she had done, and that something had to be set right in the open since it had been broken in the open. The letter came about two weeks after. It was short. It was not a good letter, it was the letter of a person who has never once in her life had to say she was sorry and does not have the words filed anywhere handy. But she wrote it. She wrote that she had been wrong about me and wrong about my children, and that she was ashamed, and that she did not know how to pay me back. I wrote her four lines back. I told her I did not do it to be paid back. I told her I did it because that farm was my daddy’s and those boys were my blood and a family holds the roof up together even when some of them do not know who is holding it. And I told her that Abby and Micah were my children, and if she ever wanted to be their aunt for real, the door was open, but it opened on my side now, not hers.

She has not walked through it yet. Maybe she will. People surprise you, sometimes, in the good direction, after they have been made to see themselves plain. Mama says there is more hope for a person who got caught than one who never did. I do not know. I have stopped needing Sherry to become something for my life to be good.