The Free Reunion at the Lake

Tracy nodded. She couldn’t speak.

“I did a wrong thing once,” Edna said. “In 1951. I’m not going to tell you what it was, because it’s none of your business. But I did it for two years before I stopped, and I’ve been sorry for seventy. So I know a little about it.”

She reached out and put her hand on top of Tracy’s. Edna’s hand was spotted and thin, the knuckles big as walnuts. Tracy’s hand was shaking under it.

“Here’s what you’re going to do,” Edna said. “Anybody in this family who asks for that money back, you give it back to them. Not with a speech. Not on the computer. You just give it back, quiet, and you say you’re sorry. By Christmas.”

“By Christmas,” Tracy said. “I will. I can. Doug’s working. I’ll do it.”

“I know you will,” Edna said. “You were always a good girl. You were the one who brought me a cup of water at your grandmother’s funeral when nobody else thought of it. You were nine. I never forgot that.”

That was when Tracy started to cry. Not loud. Just tears, running down her face and off her chin, onto her T-shirt.

Edna let her cry for a minute. Then she patted her hand twice, briskly, the way you’d pat a horse, and turned the album around on her lap.

“Now,” she said. “Amy’s been writing down names for two hours and her handwriting is terrible. You were always better at faces than her. Help me with these.”

And Tracy wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and leaned in over the album, and Edna started turning pages again.

I gave Tracy my pen and the pad. I moved back a little, onto the grass, and I watched them.

They went through the farm pictures. Then the wedding pictures from the forties and fifties. Then the reunion pictures, the old black-and-white ones from the first years at the lake, with everybody in church clothes squinting into the sun.

About halfway through, Edna turned a page and stopped. It was a picture from 1961. Two little girls standing on the dock at Pine Lake in matching swimsuits, holding hands, squinting, one of them missing a front tooth.

“Who’s that,” Edna said, though she knew.

Tracy looked at it a long time. “That’s my mom,” she said. “And that’s Aunt Joan.”

My mother came closer then. She stood behind Tracy and looked down over her shoulder at the two little girls on the dock, and she put one hand on Tracy’s back.

“Carol was always the brave one,” my mother said. “She’d jump off the end where it was deep. I’d only go off the side.”

Tracy reached up and put her hand on top of my mother’s hand, on her own shoulder. And then she was crying again, harder this time, over that picture of her mother as a little girl on the same dock I could see from where I sat.

My mother didn’t say anything else. She didn’t have to. She just kept her hand there.

I don’t know how long they stayed like that. Long enough for the light to change on the water. Long enough for the croquet game to end and the kids to come up out of the lake, shivering, looking for towels.

Then Edna closed the album with a snap.

“That’s enough for today,” she said. “Joan, it’s time for the picture. Get everybody together before the light goes.”