The Picnic at the Surveyor’s Flag

“I’m going to bring her,” I said.

The next afternoon, after I finished my route, I stopped at Grandma’s house with a sack of peaches from the stand on Highway 54. She was in her recliner with the window unit roaring and a crossword on her lap.

“There’s my mail girl,” she said. She has called me that since my first week on the route, eleven years ago. She tells everyone at church her granddaughter works for the government.

I sat on the footstool by her chair and peeled her a peach with her old paring knife, the one with the handle wrapped in black electrical tape.

“Grandma, would you come out to the place with me on the Fourth? To the pecan. I’m having a picnic.”

She stopped chewing. She looked at me over the top of her reading glasses.

“The pecan,” she said. “I haven’t sat under that tree since your grandpa’s funeral dinner. Everybody was too busy after that.”

“I’ll bring a lawn chair. I’ll drive right down the turn row so you don’t have to walk but about ten steps.”

“Who all’s coming?”

“All the grandkids but Monica. She’s working.”

Grandma looked at me a long time. Her eyes are still the sharpest thing in Custer County. She didn’t ask me why. She just put her hand over mine, the one that was holding the knife, and squeezed.

“I’ll wear my good flowered blouse,” she said.

I should have told her right then. I know that. I sat there with peach juice running down my wrist and the words in my mouth and couldn’t make myself do it. I didn’t want her hip to hear it. I wanted her to see it.

The morning of the Fourth, I was up at five frying chicken. I did four whole fryers cut up in Grandma’s way, soaked overnight in buttermilk and hot sauce, then dredged in flour with plenty of black pepper and fried in the big cast iron skillet.

Quinn left at six. A line of storms had come through Washita County in the night and knocked out power to a few hundred meters south of Cordell. He kissed me on the back of the neck and stole a thigh off the cooling rack on his way out the door.

“Save me a plate,” he said. “And don’t let your uncle rile you.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“You will,” he said. “Just don’t let him see it.”

I packed the car with everything. A folding table from the church. A big cooler of sweet tea and another of pop and water on ice. Deviled eggs. A bag of little paper flags on wooden sticks I bought at the dollar store in Weatherford.

I picked Grandma up at eleven. She was waiting on her porch in the flowered blouse, her white hair set the day before, her purse on her lap and her walker beside her like a dog that wanted to go too.

Kim, the aide, helped me get her into the front seat. “She’s been dressed since eight,” Kim whispered to me. “She’s had me check her lipstick three times.”

We drove west on the old highway, past the wheat stubble and the cotton fields, past the wind turbines turning slow on the ridge to the north. Grandma didn’t say much. She watched the fields go by and named who farmed every one of them.