The Tally on My Sister’s Refrigerator

In August the Missouri State Fair comes to Sedalia, and if you grew up here, it is the hinge the whole year swings on. Owen had talked about the ride wristband since the fair before. Thirty-five dollars. He was going to pay for it himself, he said, like a big kid.

The week before the fair opened, I asked if he wanted me to set his wristband money aside.

“I don’t think I’m going to do the rides this year,” he said.

“Owen. You love the rides. Did somebody take your money?”

“No, ma’am.” And then, carefully, like he was stepping over something in the dark: “It’s not gone. I know where it is.”

That was all I could get. I checked his room. I found nothing except a little spiral notebook in his sock drawer, the kind that costs a dollar, with a rubber band around it. I am ashamed to say I did not open it. I thought it was baseball cards.

Mom turned eighty on the twenty-second of August.

Tracy decided to give her a birthday supper.

She told me about it the way she told me everything, as a finished fact. Saturday at six. She had invited the pastor and his wife, Dale and Linda. She had invited Don and Carol from her Sunday school class, who happened to live on my street, and Brenda, who directs the choir. She was doing a ham. I could bring rolls.

“Did you ask Mom who she’d like to have?” I said.

“Mom doesn’t want a fuss. These are people who have been praying for us.” There was a little pause on the line. “It would be nice for them to see how well she’s doing here. People like to know their prayers got answered.”

I understood then what the supper was for. It was a showing, like you would have for a house.

We drove out a little before six, Jeff and Owen and me, with two dozen rolls. The cicadas were going in the hedge trees. Tracy’s porch light was on, and every lamp in the front room, and the big fixture over the dining table. I counted eleven lights burning in broad daylight.

The good tablecloth was out. The good dishes. There was a sheet cake from the grocery store bakery on the sideboard that said Happy 80th Betty in pink icing, and a bunch of balloons tied to the back of Mom’s chair.

Mom was wearing her lavender church dress. Her hair had been done. She looked nice, and she looked like a woman sitting for a photograph, which is to say she looked like she was holding her breath.

Everybody made over her. Linda kissed her cheek. Don, who is a big slow-talking man who farmed beans for forty years, held both her hands and said she did not look a day over sixty-five. Mom laughed for real at that. It was the first time I had heard that laugh since spring.

Then Carol went into the kitchen to help carry, and I went in behind her with the rolls.

The pad was still on the refrigerator.

I had assumed Tracy would take it down. I think that tells you how far I still was from understanding my sister. It had not occurred to her to take it down, because it had not occurred to her that there was anything about it to hide.

Carol stopped in front of it with the butter dish in her hand.

“Well, what’s all this, Tracy? You keeping score on somebody?”

Tracy did not miss a beat. She was lifting the ham out of the oven, and she did not even turn around.