The Picnic at the Surveyor’s Flag

“Bethany,” he said. “You pay Uncle Clyde for that survey?”

“I did.”

“I can’t,” he said. “My transmission went out on the pickup. It’s two thousand just for a rebuilt one, and that’s if I put it in myself, and I don’t know how. Clyde says if I sign his paper, he’ll cover my share of the survey and give me three thousand cash on top of it.”

“Nate.”

“I know,” he said. “I know. But three thousand dollars right now, Bethany. I can’t get to work.”

I pulled onto the shoulder by a pasture full of black baldies and put my forehead on the steering wheel. Clyde wasn’t wrong that Nate needed money. He was just using it.

“Have you signed yet?”

“Not yet. He said he’d give me till the middle of July.”

“Will you do something for me?” I asked. “Will you wait until the Fourth of July? Just until then. Come out to Grandma’s place on the Fourth. To the pecan. Bring a lawn chair.”

There was a long quiet on the line.

“What for?”

“A picnic,” I said. “And because I asked you to.”

He said he would come. He said it the way you say you’ll come to a funeral.

That night I sat at the kitchen table with my phone and called the other five, one at a time, while Quinn washed the supper dishes and listened without pretending not to.

Travis picked up on the first ring. He’s the oldest grandchild and he runs a body shop in Enid. He already knew about the survey. He had gotten the same bill and the same paper, and he had not paid either one.

“I told him where he could put it,” Travis said. “Politely. Mostly.”

“Will you come out on the Fourth? To the pecan?”

“What for? To stand around and look at his flags?”

“To eat,” I said. “To sit together on Grandma’s land while it’s still all one place.”

Travis was quiet long enough that I thought the call had dropped. “Darla’s potato salad?” he said finally.

“I’ll ask her.”

Darla had paid. She said it was just easier to pay than to listen to Clyde, and that her husband had been furious with her about it. She said she would bring the potato salad and her three boys.

Eric and Lacey, Raymond’s two oldest, live in Oklahoma City and drive out together for most holidays. Eric had paid. Lacey had not decided. Lacey admitted that she had read Clyde’s paper three times and nearly signed, because she figured she would never farm it and ten thousand dollars was ten thousand dollars.

Monica, the youngest of Raymond’s, is a nurse in Dallas. She was working a double on the Fourth and couldn’t trade. She cried a little on the phone and asked me to save her a plate and send her pictures of the pecan.

When I hung up, Quinn sat down across from me with a dish towel over his shoulder.

“Five out of six,” he said. “That’s a good turnout for a picnic nobody asked for.”

“I’m on call the Fourth,” he added, before I could answer. “If a storm comes through, I’m on a pole somewhere. I’ll get there when I can.”

“I know,” I said.

“You going to tell your grandma?”

I didn’t answer right away. Grandma had been home from rehab for a week by then. She was back in her little house in town with a walker and a home health aide named Kim who came every morning.