The Sign She Held At The Fence
Every word of that was true. I just did not tell him where I would be sitting when I got there.
He kissed the top of my head and said, “Don’t be late. They’re going alphabetical and he’s a D.”
“I won’t be late,” I said.
The sign was in the hall closet, behind the ironing board, in the flat box the poster frame from our wedding picture came in.
I had not had it out in years. I knew right where it was.
When Trevor was in kindergarten, Mrs. Pomeroy’s class did a Thanksgiving program in the cafeteria. Each child had one line. Trevor was a turkey, and his line was, “I am thankful for my family and for gravy.” He practiced it in the bathtub for two weeks. He was scared sick. The night before, he told me he was going to forget it and everyone would look at him.
“Then you look at me,” I said. “I’ll hold something up so you can find me. You find me and say it to me, and nobody else is even there.”
So after he went to bed I got out a sheet of white poster board from the Dollar General and a fat green marker. I wrote “Go Trevor” across the top in letters as tall as my hand. And then I thought it looked bare, so the next morning before school I painted his right hand brown with tempera paint, and pressed it flat in the middle, and we made it a turkey together. He drew the eye and the feet himself. The feet are on backwards. He gave it a hat.
He found me in that cafeteria in about one second. He said his line right to me. He said “gravy” so loud the principal jumped.
I held that same sign up again in May when Mrs. Pomeroy’s kindergartners walked across the cafeteria in paper caps. Then I put it in the flat box, because I am a person who keeps things, and it had been in the dark for thirteen years.
I slid it out on the bed the Thursday night before graduation, while Rick was in the shower.
The marker had gone from green to the color of a pond. The poster board had yellowed at the edges and there was a crease across one corner. But the handprint was as clear as the day we made it. Five fat little fingers. I laid my own hand next to it and his whole hand fit inside my palm.
I sat there on the edge of the bed with it. Then I put it back in the box and put the box in the trunk of my car.
Graduation was Friday the twenty-second of May, seven o’clock, and it was one of those Oklahoma evenings we get about four of a year. The wind laid down around five. The sky went the color of a peach, and the light came in low and gold across the field so that every blade of grass had a shadow.
I got Mrs. Tate her supper and her pills and her program on. She is eighty-eight and sharp as a tack and she had known since Tuesday, because I cannot keep anything from her.
“You’re going to that fence,” she said.
“Yes ma’am.”
“In that?”
I had changed in her back bedroom. I had on the blue sundress I wore to Easter and my jean jacket, and I had taken my hair down out of the clip.