The Reunion Grandma Paid For

“Those royalties belong to the men who worked the land,” my Uncle Boyd said, standing at the end of our picnic table with one hand out over it. “Always have. Always will.”

It was the second Saturday in July, and the bank sign in town had read a hundred and four degrees when I drove past it at noon. Under the county park pavilion the air just sat there, thick with brisket smoke and bug spray.

There were seventy-some of us that year. Tidwells from Elk City and Weatherford and Clinton, a carload from Amarillo, two cousins who had flown in from Denver and kept saying how flat everything was, like we hadn’t noticed.

Grandma sat beside me at the long table with a paper plate in front of her. She had her hands folded in her lap the way she always does when she is listening hard, and she wore the pale yellow blouse I had ironed for her that morning.

She is eighty-six. I am her granddaughter, Leah Tidwell, and I have set her short white curls every Thursday since the week I got my cosmetology license. That was eleven years ago. She has never once missed an appointment, not even the week of Grandpa’s funeral.

It was my cousin Kyle’s wife who started it, and she didn’t mean anything by it. She had been looking out past the pavilion at the wheat stubble, where a pumpjack nodded way off on the far section line, and she asked how Grandpa’s old gas well was holding up.

That was when Boyd stood up. He had on his white straw cowboy hat and the blue work shirt he wears to everything that isn’t a funeral, and his face was sunburned the color of a brick from a week of cutting wheat and hauling water.

“That well’s doing all right,” he said. “And I’ll tell you what I’ve always said. Those royalties belong to the men who worked the land.”

A couple of the older men at the next table nodded. One of them said “That’s right” into his iced tea. Boyd has a way of saying things like they were settled a long time ago and you just didn’t hear about it.

I looked at Grandma. She had not moved at all. Her hands stayed folded. Her plate sat there with the beans running into the potato salad.

Then she said, so quietly that only I and maybe Jace heard it, “I thought those checks quit.”

Jace is Boyd’s grandson. He is nine, all elbows and sunburned ears, and he had wandered over to our end of the table because Grandma always has a roll of peppermints in her purse. He looked up at her when she said it. Then he looked at his grandpa.

I felt something cold go down the back of my neck, even in that heat.

Because I knew those checks had not quit. I knew it the way you know a thing you have been trying not to know. Boyd had told the whole family, back in 2019, that the well was about played out and the little bit that came in went to taxes and paperwork.

And here he was, telling seventy people that the royalties were doing all right, and that they belonged to him.

I didn’t say a word. I picked up the plastic knife and cut Grandma’s brisket into small pieces, the way I always do, because her hands have gotten stiff and she won’t ask.

She ate a little. She smiled at Jace and gave him a peppermint. She asked one of the Denver cousins about her new baby. If you didn’t know her, you would have thought nothing had happened at all.

But I know her. And I saw her press her lips together the way she did at Grandpa’s graveside, when the honor guard folded the flag and she would not let herself cry in front of the Legion boys.