The Name on the White Reunion Shirt

Thirty by noon

By the time the noon program started, thirty cousins had signed my shirt. I know it was thirty because Emily counted them out loud in the bathroom mirror for me, twice.

There were names I had not thought about in years. Cousins from Albert Lea and Austin and one from as far away as Sioux Falls. A second cousin I had not spoken to since our grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party. The Kruse twins. A brother-in-law from the Berg side who wrote “Methodist” in small letters next to his name and winked at me.

My son Jake was the holdout. He is sixteen, and sixteen is an age when your mother walking around a county park in a homemade shirt is roughly the worst thing that can happen to you.

He stood by the horseshoe pit with his hands in his pockets and pretended he did not know any of us.

Mike went over and stood next to him for a while. I could not hear what they said. Mike is not much of a talker, and Jake is less of one, so I imagine it was mostly the two of them looking at the horseshoe pit.

And the whole time, Sandra sat at the picnic table by the registration boxes with her clipboard flat in her lap, and she watched every single signature.

She did not come over. She did not say anything. She just watched, and I could not read her face.

Sandra

I want to be fair to my cousin. That is part of why I am telling this.

Sandra Lindgren is fifty-five years old. She is a dental hygienist in Owatonna. She has run the Lindgren reunion for twenty years without one dollar of pay, and before every single one she has called every household on the list herself.

She keeps the birthdays. She keeps the addresses. When my Emily was born, Sandra was the first person outside our house to send a card, and it had a ten-dollar bill in it.

So when she left us off, it was not because she was careless. Sandra has never been careless in her life. It was because, somewhere in her, there was a rule. And I did not know where the rule came from.

Just before the program started, I went over to her table. I did it because I thought she should hear it from me and not from everybody else.

“Sandra,” I said. “This isn’t against you. I hope you know that.”

She looked up at me, and then past me, at the line of navy shirts filing toward the folding chairs.

“It’s against something,” she said.

“It’s for something,” I said. “That’s all.”

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said a thing I did not understand until later.

“Marrying out is what breaks a family, Teresa. I grew up knowing that. I didn’t make it up.”

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody had to.” She stood up with her clipboard. “I have to go do the welcome.”