The Anniversary Dinner They Started Without Me

The Fall Festival

Sourwood Gap holds its harvest festival the first weekend of November, out at the fairgrounds off Route 9, and my family has gone every single year of my life without exception, my mother running a table for the church auxiliary and my father judging the tractor pull he used to compete in himself. I almost skipped it that year. I did not skip it.

My mother found me by the funnel cake stand, out of her apron for once, and she did not lead with an apology this time. She led with a question, which from her was the bigger gesture.

“Will you let us take you and whoever you want to bring to dinner sometime soon? Our treat. Actually our treat, this time. I’ll pay before you even sit down if that’s what it takes for you to believe me.”

I told her I would think about it, and I meant that honestly, not as a brush off. Trust does not come back all at once just because somebody finally says the right sentence in a parking lot full of kettle corn smell. But three weeks later, on a Thursday that had no occasion attached to it at all, no birthday, no anniversary, nothing to celebrate, my parents took me to dinner at a diner on the county road, not The Crossing, someplace smaller and cheaper where nobody had a nickname for us. My father paid before the food even hit the table, slid his card to the waitress the second she walked up, like he wanted to make sure I saw it happen before I could talk myself into offering.

Philomena was not there that night. She called me two weeks after that, on her own, no prompting from our mother that I know of, and the first thing she said was, “I’ve been a truly terrible sister to you for a long time and I don’t have a good excuse, I just have reasons, and reasons aren’t excuses.” I did not tell her everything was fine, because it was not yet. I told her I appreciated her saying it, and that I needed some time before dinners with her stopped feeling like bracing for a bill. She said she understood. We are still working on it. Some weeks it goes better than others.