The Picnic at the Surveyor’s Flag

At the end of her lane, I turned in past the mailbox I fill six days a week. The draw was green from the rain we’d had, and the pecan stood up over it like a church steeple.

I drove down the turn row slow, the way I promised, and stopped in the shade. The orange flag was right there, about forty feet out in the grass, flapping in a wind that already felt like a hair dryer.

I got her lawn chair set up under the biggest limb, the one Grandpa used to hang a tire swing from, and helped her from the car to the chair. It took us a while. She was breathing hard when she sat down, and she patted my arm to tell me she was fine.

Then she looked out across the pasture. She looked at the flag. She looked past it to the next one, way out by the fence line, and the one beyond that on the far side of the draw.

“Bethany,” she said. “What is all that doing in my pasture?”

I knelt down in the grass next to her chair. And I told her everything.

The bill. The paper. The ten thousand dollars. Nate’s transmission. Lacey reading the paper three times. Travis not paying and Darla paying just to stop the phone calls. My check out of Quinn’s truck fund.

She didn’t interrupt me once. When I was done, she didn’t say anything at all. She just reached over and put her hand on my arm, high up, near the elbow, and held on.

Her hand was thin and dry and cool even in that heat. She held on for a long time. I could feel her thinking through it the way you feel a storm moving a long way off.

“Go set your table, honey,” she said at last. “They’ll be here soon.”

I set up the folding table right beside the stake. I didn’t do that to be ugly. That was just where the ground was flattest and closest to the shade, and I figured if Clyde wanted to draw a line, we might as well eat on it.

I spread Grandma’s red checked tablecloth and stood the little paper flags up along the middle of the table. I set out the deviled eggs under a dish towel and lined up the sweet tea.

By one o’clock, it was ninety-nine degrees. By two, the thermometer on my phone said a hundred and one, and the wind off the south was hot as an oven door.

The pasture grass had gone dry and gold around us, the dirt between the clumps was as red as a brick, and out past the fence the neighbor’s wheat still stood gold, waiting on a custom crew that was running late.

Travis came first, in his shop pickup, with a sack of ice and a big box of fireworks he’d bought at a stand outside Enid. He kissed Grandma on the top of the head and stood looking at the flag with his hands on his hips.

“Well,” he said. “There it is.”

Darla came next with her husband and three boys and a mixing bowl of potato salad the size of a hubcap. The boys ran straight for the draw to look for crawdads. Darla hugged me and whispered, “I’m sorry I paid.”

“Don’t be,” I said. “I paid too.”

Eric and Lacey came together from the city. Lacey had made a sheet cake with strawberries and blueberries laid out like a flag on top, and she set it down on the table and then stood holding her own elbows.