The Reunion Grandma Paid For

June

The first week of June she called me at the salon. I had a perm in the rollers and the phone tucked against my shoulder.

“Leah, I’ve decided something,” she said. “I’m paying for the barbecue this year. At the reunion.”

“The whole thing?”

“The whole thing. All the brisket and all the sausage. And the tea.” She said it like she had been practicing. “Out of my account. The one with my name on it.”

Usually Boyd collects twenty dollars a family in a coffee can and orders the meat, and there’s always grumbling about who paid.

“Grandma, that’s a lot of money.”

“I called them. Fourteen dollars a plate with two sides. Seventy plates is nine hundred eighty dollars, and the tea is extra.” She paused. “I have it. I’ve had it every month since September, and I didn’t know what to do with all of it. Now I know.”

“Are you sure?”

“I have never been surer of anything in my life,” she said. “Your grandpa would want to feed people. That’s all money is for.”

She had Pam drive her to the barbecue place out on the highway, and paid them in advance with a check written in her careful hand. The man behind the counter told me later that she had asked him to make sure the brisket was cut thin, because some of the old folks had trouble with their teeth.

The Second Reunion

It was a Saturday again, the second one in July, and hot again. A hundred and one at noon by the bank sign. The same pavilion at the county park, the same long tables, the same wheat stubble gone gold beyond it and the same pumpjack nodding far off on the section line.

I did Grandma’s hair that morning in her own kitchen, with my traveling kit. I set her curls a little higher than usual and gave her a spritz of the good hairspray. She wore her pale yellow blouse, the one from last year. She said it was her lucky blouse now.

“Are you nervous?” I asked.

“No,” she said. Then, “Maybe a little.”

“About what?”

She looked at herself in the hand mirror I held up. “About whether he’ll come.”

The barbecue place delivered at noon. Two men carried in the steel pans of brisket and sausage and set them on the serving table at the far end of the pavilion, covered in foil, steaming even in that heat. The smell went all through the park.

At twelve twenty, an old Chevy pickup with a cracked windshield pulled into the gravel lot.

I saw Grandma see it. Her hands folded in her lap.

Boyd got out slowly. He had his white straw hat and a clean shirt. Pam came around from the other side with a bowl of potato salad covered in plastic wrap. Kyle and his wife and Jace pulled in right behind them.

Pam came straight in and hugged Grandma. Jace ran to the cousins. Boyd stood at the edge of the pavilion for a long moment, like a man at the edge of cold water.

Then he walked in and sat down at the very far end of the very last table. By himself. Down by the serving table, with the brisket pans. He took his hat off and set it on the bench beside him and looked at his hands.

Nobody said anything to him. Nobody was unkind. But nobody went down there either. The whole pavilion seemed to be holding its breath a little.