The Top Tier I Sent My Niece

I am saying the grown people made a choice, and they made it the way our family makes every choice, which is in favor of April, and in favor of her children, and against me, and all of it dressed up so nicely in reasonable words that you feel like the small one for noticing.

My mother has a way of saying “well you know how April is” that is supposed to end the conversation. April is the one who needs.

April is the one who struggles. I am the one who manages.

I have been the one who manages since I was nine years old and learned to make my own lunch so my mother would have her hands free for the baby.

You get a role in a family early and you keep it your whole life unless you do something to break it. I had never done anything to break mine.

I managed. I understood. I figured it out. I drove the two hours.

So I told myself, in April, that of course they would figure out how to clap for Kaylee at two and love me at four.

That is what reasonable people do. I forgot, for a few weeks, that reasonable was never the thing being measured.

The RSVP Card

The reply cards started coming back in May.

I had ordered them from a catalog, cream with a little sprig of wheat in the corner, and a line for the number attending, and a stamp already on the return envelope because Seth said people are more likely to send a thing back if you do the stamp for them.

Seth was right. They came back.

From the clinic, from the co-op, from church, from Darlene, from the neighbors on our road and Seth’s cousins down in Arkansas who said they would drive up.

My mother’s card did not come back.

I asked her about it at Sunday dinner, light, the way you ask a thing you are sure of. “You get your reply card, Mama?

I’m doing the head count for the ham.”

“Oh, that,” she said, and she looked at my father, and my father looked at his plate. “Honey, we need to talk to you about the day.”

The day. Not the wedding. The day, the way you say a thing that has two parties in it fighting for the same hours.

“Kaylee’s graduation is a real milestone,” my mother said. “April’s just beside herself about the timing. And you know how Kaylee’s been.

This is a big deal for her, getting into the honor society and all.”

“It’s eleven minutes,” I said. “Two o’clock to four o’clock. It’s eleven minutes down the county road.”

“It’s just that there’s the lunch after,” April said, because of course April was there, April is always there.

“The school does a whole luncheon for the honor kids and the families, and then we wanted to do a little party at the house, cake and everything, let her have her day.”