The Saturdays We Raked Her Leaves

I only know that because Gracie asked her, right out, “Grandma, whose plate did you set first?”

And Vonda said, “Your mama’s,” without even stopping to think about it, and went back to the kitchen for the gravy.

Before we ate, Vonda asked Clay to say the blessing. That had been Ray’s job, every meal of their married life.

Clay looked at her, and she nodded, and he bowed his head and said it in his daddy’s exact words.

Vonda cried through the whole blessing with her eyes shut and her hand pressed flat on the tablecloth.

Nobody said a thing about it. Rhett reached over and patted her arm, the way he’d seen me do to his daddy.

After dinner the kids went in the living room to play with what they’d gotten.

Vonda went to the hall closet and came out with something long and skinny, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a red ribbon.

She handed it to Rhett. “This one’s from your Pawpaw and me,” she said. “Go on. Open it.”

He tore the paper off. It was Ray’s rake. The black tape was gone.

Somebody had put a brand new hickory handle on it, sanded smooth as a church pew, with R.H. burned in near the top just the way it had been before.

Below it, smaller and newer, somebody had burned the letters R.H. a second time. Rhett ran his finger over both sets and looked up at his grandmother with his mouth open.

“Rhett Hollister,” Vonda said. “Same letters. I had the man at the hardware store put the handle on. I burned the letters myself with a nail heated on the stove eye, same as your Pawpaw did. Took me three tries.”

Rhett held that rake like it was a rifle and he had just been sworn in. “Can I keep it at our house?” he asked her.

“No,” Vonda said. “You keep it here. In the shed. Where it goes. And you come over here and use it.”

That evening, while the kids watched a movie and I did the dishes because Vonda finally let me, Clay and his mother went out and sat on the front porch together in the cold.

I could see them through the kitchen window, side by side, her in the kitchen chair with the quilt and him on the top step.

I didn’t hear all of it. I didn’t try to. But the window over the sink was cracked for the steam, and some of it carried.

“Mama,” Clay said, “there’s something I never told you. About when I left the farm.”

She waited. I stood at the sink with my hands in the dishwater and didn’t move.

“Daddy told me to go,” Clay said. “When I met Jenna. He sat me down out in the barn and told me to marry her and take the county job. He said the farm was going to eat one of us alive, and it wasn’t going to be me.”

It was quiet for a long time. Then Clay said, “He said one of us ought to have weekends. He said it just like that. One of us ought to have weekends.”

“He never told me that,” Vonda said. Her voice was so low I almost missed it.