The Sign She Held At The Fence
I started to step in beside Rick.
“No ma’am,” Trevor said. “You’re here.”
He moved me in front of him, dead center, and put both his big hands on my shoulders.
“Where’s the sign?” Kim said.
“Oh, now, we don’t need that.”
“Yes we do,” Kim said. “Mama, hand it to her. It’s right there on the chair.”
So that is the picture. Five people on a football field in Harlan Creek, Oklahoma, on the twenty-second of May. A boy in a cap and gown with his eyes red. His father. His mother. His grandmother. And in the front, a home health aide in an Easter dress, holding up a yellowed piece of poster board that says “Go Trevor” over a turkey with its feet on backwards.
Kim’s daddy took four. In the third one everybody is laughing, because Trevor had just said, “I am thankful for my family and for gravy,” in the loudest voice he had.
We did all go to Cedar Street for the brisket. Kim set me a place between Rick and her mother without making anything of it.
Trevor rode home with us instead of taking his truck. He sat in the back seat like he was nine, with his gown wadded up beside him. About the Bowring turnoff he said, “Shelly.”
“Hm.”
“When I said that. In the kitchen. Real parents.”
“I know what you meant by it.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think I knew what I meant by it. I think I just wanted her to feel like she hadn’t missed everything. And there was only four, and I thought, Shelly won’t be mad. Shelly’s never mad. Shelly will be there no matter what I do.” He was quiet a second. “And then I looked out there and you were. No matter what I did. And I thought, that’s the realest thing there is, and I put it on the wrong side of the fence.”
Rick reached across the seat and took my hand and did not let go of it until our driveway.
“You’re eighteen,” I said to the windshield. “You’re supposed to count wrong a few times. It’s the going back and counting again that makes a man.”
“Dad teach you that?”
“Mrs. Tate,” I said. “Monday you’re coming with me to tell her the whole story. She’s waiting on it.”
He did, too, in a clean shirt. I fastened her gold cross back around her neck myself.
The real diploma came in the mail the second week of June. Trevor slid it into the blue cover and stood it up on the bookshelf in the front room, and then he stood there looking at the wall above it.
“It needs something next to it,” he said.
He took the wedding picture frame out of the hall closet, the big one, and he took our wedding picture out of it and found that a smaller frame. And he put the sign in.
It hangs in the front room now, over the bookshelf. Pond-green marker. One brown handprint. A crooked hat.
He leaves for the tech school in Okmulgee in August, for the welding program. I expect I will cry, and nobody needs a ticket to stand in a driveway.
But I pressed my thumb on the toe of his new work boots last week when he was not looking.
They fit. He has room to grow.