The Envelope They Did Not Hand My Husband

He told me one more thing that night, which he had never told me in June. When they dug that northeast corner out to fix it, the track hoe bucket did not hit bottom. It went down through four feet of chat and rotten timber and old trash. Mine fill. Half of Jasper County is sitting on diggings nobody ever wrote down, from back when they pulled lead and zinc out of this ground. The engineer made them dig that corner clear down to solid rock and bring it back up before he would let a yard of concrete near it.

“So it would have been sitting on that,” I said.

“One corner of it.”

“A corner of what, Adam? What is that part of the building?”

He told me. I am going to make you wait a minute for it, the same as the whole picnic had to.

So that is why I was on the quilt with my husband’s hand on my knee, doing what he had asked me to do, with my face hot and my jaw so tight my ears hurt.

I reached for Ruby. I wanted her in my lap. I wanted something to hold on to.

Ruby was not on the quilt.

Her popsicle stick was there, and one of her sneakers, which she had kicked off and then evidently put back on, because it was gone the next time I looked. I looked up.

She was halfway across the grass.

She had on her yellow sundress, the one with the pockets, and her ponytail had come mostly loose from the creek. She was not running. She was walking the way she walks up the aisle at church when it is her turn to take up the children’s offering, careful and straight, like she had been sent.

“Ruby,” I said. Not loud enough.

Adam’s head came up. “Where’s she going?”

She walked under the edge of the pavilion roof, out of the sun and into the shade, past the cooler of pop, past Dwight, and stopped in front of the folding table. Mr. Garland was a big man, sixty or so, heavy through the middle, in a tan polo shirt with the company name sewn on it. He had a serving fork in his hand. Ruby came about to his belt.

He looked down. He smiled at her, and it was a real smile. I will give him that. He has always been good to the kids.

“Well, hello there, Miss Ruby. You need a plate?”

“No, sir,” Ruby said.

She has a clear little voice. Her teacher says she projects. The cicadas picked that exact second to quit, the way they do, all at once, and every person under that roof heard her.

“Did you forget my dad?”

I was already getting up. I had one knee under me and my hand on the ground.

Mr. Garland’s smile stayed where it was, but it stopped meaning anything.

“What’s that, honey?”

“You gave everybody an envelope,” Ruby said. “You didn’t give my dad one. He worked forty-one Saturdays. I put the stars on.”

Nobody at any table said a word. A baby fussed somewhere in the back. I heard a horseshoe ring against the stake down the hill, somebody’s teenagers who had no idea.

Mr. Garland laughed.

It was not a mean laugh. It was the laugh a grown man uses on a child when he wants a thing to be small. He set the serving fork down and put his hands on his knees and bent toward her.