The Name on the White Reunion Shirt

Carl

Uncle Carl got up out of his lawn chair then. It took him a while. Mike went over and gave him an arm without being asked, and Carl let him.

Carl came and stood behind his wife’s bench and put his hand on her shoulder.

“I knew,” he said, to all of us. “She told me in 1963, the night before I asked her. She said she wanted me to know there’d been somebody. I said I’d wait till she was done crying.”

“And he did,” Aunt Ruth said.

“Took a while,” Carl said. “I was patient.” And people laughed, finally, a little, the way you laugh at a funeral when somebody tells a good story about the dead.

“I loved you, Carl,” Aunt Ruth said. “I want everybody to know that. Sixty-two years. I have never once been sorry I married you. But I am sorry about that boy, and I am sorry about what my father did to him, and I will not watch my daughter do it to Teresa.”

What Mike had been doing

Sandra did not say anything for a long time. She sat there with her mother’s hand on hers, and she looked at my shirt, and then she looked at Mike.

And then Aunt Ruth said one more thing.

“And I’ll tell you something else, Sandy, since I’m telling things. You know who mows Bethany?”

Sandra shook her head. “The cemetery association does.”

“The cemetery association,” Aunt Ruth said, “has eleven hundred dollars in the bank and one member under seventy. They haven’t paid anybody to mow that cemetery since 2006.”

She pointed at Mike, who was still standing by Uncle Carl with his hand under the old man’s elbow.

“He does. Every other Saturday, May to October, for twenty years. My mother and father are buried there. Your grandmother and grandfather Lindgren are buried there. Every Lindgren since the home place is buried in that ground, and a Catholic boy from Janesville has been mowing around their stones on his day off, and he has never said one word about it to a living soul.”

I turned around and looked at my husband.

I did not know. Twenty-four years of marriage and I did not know. I knew he left early every other Saturday in summer. I thought he was going to help his brother on the dairy.

“Mike,” I said.

He looked at the ground. He turned bright red, which I have seen him do maybe four times in our whole marriage.

“The grass was up to the stones,” he said. “Somebody had to.”

“How did you know?” I asked Aunt Ruth.

“I go out Wednesdays to see my folks,” she said. “I’d see the grass fresh cut and the trimmer line on the stones. One Saturday I drove out early and there was his truck. I sat in my car at the end of the lane and watched him do my mother’s row with a hand trimmer, on his knees, so he wouldn’t nick the stone.”

She looked at Sandra. “I never told anybody because he never told anybody. I figured it was his to tell. But I’m eighty-two, and I’m done keeping things in pantries.”