The Name on the White Reunion Shirt

The hundredth

The program was the same as it always was, only bigger. Sandra did the welcome and read the history: the home place south of Owatonna, the first reunion in 1927, the year they held it in the church basement because of the polio scare.

Then came the family picture. Dale’s son-in-law climbed up on a stepladder with a good camera, and Sandra arranged two hundred people in rows by branch, Lindgrens in the middle, everybody else out from there.

When she got to us, she hesitated. Then she pointed to the far end of the back row.

“You can stand there, Teresa,” she said. “So the shirts line up.”

I went and stood there. I did not argue. In that picture, if you look at it now, there are two hundred people in navy blue, and on the very end of the very back row is one woman in white.

But here is the thing about the picture. You can see, if you look closely, that half the back row has turned their heads a little. Toward the end. Toward me.

The potluck

After the picture, the food came out. Two long rows of picnic tables pushed end to end and covered with every casserole southern Minnesota knows how to make. Tater tot hotdish. Three kinds of scalloped corn. Seven-layer salad. Somebody’s grandmother’s lefse, rolled with butter and sugar.

The pastor from Bethany said the prayer. He is a young man, and he kept it short, which everybody appreciated.

I had my plate in my hand and was looking for Mike when I felt somebody tug the back of my shirt.

It was Jake.

He did not look at me. He had a marker in his hand, and he was red to the ears.

“Hold still,” he said. “Don’t make it weird.”

“I’m not making it weird.”

“You’re making it weird with your face.”

He signed my shoulder. Not the back, where everybody else had signed. My shoulder, right up near the collar, where he would have to reach. He wrote Jake Volk, and under it, because he is sixteen and cannot help himself, he drew a very small, very bad picture of a cow.

“That’s for Dad,” he said. “Because of the milk truck.”

I did not cry at the registration table, and I did not cry in the picture. But I nearly cried with a plate of hotdish in my hand while my son drew a cow on my shoulder.

Aunt Ruth

When Jake stepped back, there was somebody waiting behind him.

It was Aunt Ruth.

She had gotten out of her lawn chair, which she did not do lightly anymore. She had her purse over one arm and a black marker in her other hand, and she was standing there in her navy shirt with her white hair pinned up, waiting her turn like a woman at the post office.

From the picnic table, Sandra stood up so fast the bench scraped the concrete.

“Mom,” she said. “Mom. What are you doing?”

Aunt Ruth did not answer her. She took me by both shoulders and turned me around, gently, the way you turn a little child to button the back of a coat.

“Hold still, Teresa,” she said. “I’ve waited sixty-five years to write this one.”

I heard the marker uncap.

Then I felt her write. It was slow. Her hand was not steady anymore, and she pressed hard, and it took her a long time. People had stopped eating. I could feel the whole shelter house go quiet the way a church does before the benediction.

When she was done, she capped the marker and stood back.

“Now turn around and let them read it,” she said.

I did not know what it said. I could not see my own back. I turned around, and it was Kim who read it, out loud, because Kim was closest.

“Leo Becker,” Kim read. And then, smaller, underneath it: “1961.”