The Gate My Brother Could Not Open

His idea. Covering the whole spread. The least he can do after all the family’s done for him.

I had to set the phone down on the fence rail and stand there a minute. Shelby stayed on the line. I could hear her breathing. Finally she said, real quiet, “I didn’t say anything because I didn’t think it was my place. But it made me sick, Uncle Wade. You never offered anything. He just said you did and everybody wanted it to be true so they believed it.”

“Shelby,” I said. “I need you to do one thing for me, and you can say no.”

“I won’t say no.”

“When they all come up here Labor Day,” I said, “I need you to bring your phone. And I need you to not warn anybody what’s on it.”

She was quiet. Then she said, “Yes sir.”

I spent the rest of that week getting ready, and I want to tell you what getting ready looked like, because it was not what Dana feared and it was not what you might think. I did not buy a single brisket. I did not stock a single cooler. But I did not board up the house and sit in the dark with a shotgun either, which is the version my mother tells now. What I did was prepare to be fair. I decided that every single person coming up my road on Labor Day deserved the plain truth, once, out loud, and then a real choice. That was the whole plan. The truth, and a choice. I was not going to decide for them. I was going to make them decide for themselves, in the open, which is the one thing my family had never once had to do.

I wrote it out longhand on a legal pad at the kitchen table over three nights, crossing out and starting over, Dana reading each version and handing it back. Not a speech. I am no good at speeches, that is Brett’s department. Just the facts of it, plain, the way I would tell a banker why I needed a note. What it costs to host thirty-four people for five days. What I actually make in a year. The funeral I paid for. The truck. The summer with the boys. And the last line, the one Dana said had to be in there, the one I did not want to write because writing it made it real: “I love every one of you. But I am done being used by people who call it love.”

Then I got a folding table out of the machine shed, the long one we use for brandings. And I waited for Labor Day.

They came Thursday morning. I knew they would come early because Brett had said Thursday through Monday and Brett is never late to anything that is free.

I heard them before I saw them. You can hear a vehicle on my section line a mile off when it is dry, and that morning there was not one vehicle, there was a line of them, a dust cloud coming up the red dirt road like a cattle drive, pickups and minivans and Brett’s big diesel out front, the one I paid for, and behind them a camper, and behind that more cars, Arkansas plates, Texas plates. Thirty-four people. I stood in my own driveway and watched my family come to eat me alive and call it a reunion, and I was not afraid anymore. I had been afraid for forty-six years. I was all done with it.