The Name on the White Reunion Shirt
There were no extras
“Could we get four shirts, then?” I asked. “Mike and me and the kids. We’ll take whatever sizes are left.”
“I ordered exactly 214,” Sandra said. “I went by the RSVP list and the household list. There aren’t any extras.”
“We sent our RSVP in June,” I said. “I mailed it to you myself.”
“I know.” She finally looked at me. Her face was not angry. That was the strange thing. It was careful, the way a person looks when she has rehearsed something. “I just didn’t know how to list you, Teresa. So I didn’t.”
I know what those shirts cost because Kim told me later. Eleven dollars apiece screen-printed, two-sided, a little over twenty-three hundred dollars, paid out of the reunion fund. Our twenty-five dollars a year was in that coffee can. So were twenty years of us.
Mike had come up behind me with the folding chairs. He did not need anybody to explain it to him. He had read the back of the shirt over my shoulder.
“Want me to go talk to her?” he asked, very quietly, close to my ear.
I loved him for asking. Mike is not a man who goes looking for a fight. He spent eighteen years driving a milk truck and the last twelve running the scale at the co-op elevator, and I have never once heard him raise his voice to a farmer.
I shook my head. “Not today.”
Across the shelter house, in a green-and-white webbed lawn chair somebody had set in the shade for her, Aunt Ruth was holding court with three of the great-grandkids. She was eighty-two. She had driven herself.
I could have made it a scene. A hundred years of this family, two hundred people in navy blue, and Aunt Ruth fifty feet away with a toddler on her knee. I was not going to start a fight at the hundredth in front of her.
So I said the only true thing I could think of.
“Thank you for all your hard work, Sandra. They look beautiful. They really do.”
She blinked. I think she had been ready for something else.
Then I picked up my scalloped corn, set it with the other hot dishes, and walked out to Mike’s pickup.