The Coffee Can at the Farm Gate

Uncle Merle counted five one-dollar bills onto my kitchen table and apologized for being short.

He did it slowly, the way he does everything now. He smoothed each bill flat against the oilcloth with the side of his thumb, and he lined them up so the edges matched.

“I sent Tammy the twenty in June,” he said. “This makes my twenty-five. I’m sorry it’s late, Carla. My check doesn’t come till the third, and I had the truck battery go.”

It was the Thursday before the reunion, a little after two in the afternoon. I had flour to my elbows. There were four dozen apricot kolaches cooling on the counter and a bowl of poppy seed filling waiting its turn, and the kitchen was so hot the butter had gone soft in the dish.

I wiped my hands on my apron.

“Your twenty-five what, Merle?”

He looked at me like I was teasing him. Merle is eighty-eight years old and he has been teased by this family his whole life, so he smiled a little, waiting for the rest of the joke.

There wasn’t any rest of it.

“For Saturday,” he said. “The reunion money.”

“What reunion money?”

The smile went off his face a piece at a time.

He reached up to the pocket of his snap shirt, the same pocket where he keeps his reading glasses and a stub of carpenter’s pencil, and he brought out a letter folded in thirds. It had been folded and unfolded enough times that the creases had gone soft as cloth.

He held it out to me across the kolaches.

I knew the paper. Tammy has used the same pale yellow paper for the reunion letter for nine years, ever since Bob’s mother passed and the invitations fell to her. Bob and I never get one. We don’t need one. The reunion is in our yard.

So I had never seen this letter. I had never seen any of them.

It started the way I would have guessed. The date, the last Saturday in August. Dinner at half past twelve. Bring a lawn chair and a covered dish. Then there was a paragraph I read twice, standing in my own kitchen with my glasses pushed up in my hair.

“This year we are asking $25 per person to cover expenses. Please send cash or a check made out to Tammy by August 1 so we have a head count.”

And under that, on a line by itself:

“Please do not bother Carla and Bob about this. They have enough to do.”

I read that line a third time.

I have cooked for that reunion for thirty-one years. I cooked for it the summer I married Bob, when I was twenty-nine and scared to death of his mother’s kitchen, and I have cooked for it every August since. For the last nine years I have bought the hogs myself. Two butcher hogs from Dale up the road, three hundred and ninety dollars for the pair this year, plus what the locker charges to dress them.

I pay for them out of my egg and quilt money. I always have. Bob has offered the farm account a hundred times, and I have told him a hundred times that the reunion is my gift to his family and I would like to be the one who gives it.

Nobody has ever paid a dime to sit down at my table.

“Carla?” Merle said.

I looked up. His hand was resting on those five ones like he was afraid they would blow away.