The Name on the White Reunion Shirt

Kim

Kim is a year older than me. Her mother and my mother were the two youngest Lindgren girls. We have stood next to each other at that coffee urn since we were tall enough to reach the spigot.

She set down the cream. She took the marker out of my hand without asking and turned me back around.

“Kim,” I said. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t,” she said. “Hold still.”

She signed it big and loopy, the way she signs birthday cards, and then underneath it she wrote, in small letters, Kim Lindgren Hanson. Every name she had.

“There,” she said. “Now it’s a party.”

That was when I noticed people had started to drift. Not all at once. Nobody marched over. It was more like how a church hall fills up after the last hymn, a few at a time, people finding a reason to be near the coffee.

Dale and the Nygaard girls

Dale was next. Dale is my second cousin, sixty-three years old, and farms twelve hundred acres of corn and beans north of Blooming Prairie with his two sons. He came in with dirt still on his boots from checking a pivot that morning.

He read my back without his glasses, squinting. Then he looked at Mike, who was standing at the edge of the shelter house with a paper plate of bars.

“This about the shirts?” Dale asked him.

Mike nodded once.

Dale did not say another word about it. He took the marker, signed his name in square farmer’s capitals, and then shook Mike’s hand, the long, two-pump handshake men in this county give each other at funerals and at auctions.

“Good to see you, Mike,” he said. “Your corn make it through that hail?”

“Mostly,” Mike said.

“Mine too. Mostly.” And that was the whole conversation, and it said more than a speech.

The three Nygaard girls came next, twelve and fourteen and fifteen, in their navy shirts with their names on the back. They signed in purple, because one of them had a purple marker in her purse, and they giggled the whole time and drew a little heart over the O in one of the names.

Then their mother signed. Then their grandfather, Arlen, who had been reunion president for thirty years before Sandra took it over, and who walked over with his cane and said, “Make room, make room, I’m eighty-seven, I don’t have all day.”

He signed Arlen Nygaard, President Emeritus. Then he patted my shoulder and said, “Your grandmother would have liked this.”

I had to look at the ceiling of the shelter house for a minute after that.