The Weekend We Booked Dad’s Farmhouse

Then I went looking for the family pictures. They were gone from the walls, all of them. There were pale squares on the wallpaper where they had hung, all the way up the stairs.

I found them in the hall closet, in two plastic totes, each one wrapped in a dish towel. Wrapped careful. Every one.

Mike found me sitting on the closet floor. He did not say anything. He just handed them to me one at a time, and I hung them back on their nails in the same order they had always been.

By three o’clock the cars were coming down the gravel one after another, and by half past three it was the reunion. Cousin Jeff with the horseshoes. The Minnesota cousins with three campers in a row like a wagon train.

Aunt Joan rode up in the front seat of her grandson’s car, waving out the window like the Queen of England, and the lawn chairs came out of the trunks and went up in a ring.

Somebody set up a folding table and it filled up in ten minutes. Ham balls and scalloped potatoes and sweet corn and three kinds of bars and a green Jell-O salad nobody would admit to bringing.

The kids went straight for the grove and the barn and the old tire swing, running and yelling the way kids have run on that farm for a hundred years.

It was hot, the kind of late summer afternoon where the air sits on you, and the corn behind the house did not move at all.

I had on my coral t-shirt and jean shorts, and I could not stop walking in circles. I kept going in the house and coming out again. Mike told me to sit down. I told him I could not.

At five minutes to four, I opened the app and wrote to our host. Hi, it’s Mike’s wife. We have a few more guests than we planned on. Could we get some extra towels?

He wrote back in under a minute. Sure thing! How many more?

I looked out at the yard and counted roughly, the way you count cattle through a gate. About 54, I wrote.

There was no answer for a long time. Long enough that Mike came and stood next to me and looked at the phone too. Then: On my way.

I went and stood out front with my hands on my hips. My cousin Jeff’s little boy ran up and asked who was coming now, because it seemed like everybody had already come.

“The host,” I told him, and he ran off to tell the others.

Erik pulled in with Dad at four o’clock on the dot. He parked the van by the machine shed and came around to slide the side door open and get the walker out.

Dad swung his legs out and stood. He had on his seed cap, the one he wears everywhere, even to church when Mom was not looking.

He stood there holding the walker and looked at his house. He had not been home since February. Then he looked at the yard, all those lawn chairs and all those people, and I watched it come over his face.