“Mom, you’ll fall on your face,” my sister Teri said, and she laughed while she said it, out in Mom’s front yard with the whole family standing around the porch steps.
It was a Sunday at the end of September in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma.
We had eaten at Mom’s like we do most Sundays, and afterward everybody drifted outside because the evening had finally cooled off.
Mom was sitting on the top step with a letter in her lap.
It had come that week from the high school, on the good paper, with the school seal pressed into the corner.
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She read it out loud to us. The class of 1966 was invited back for its 60th reunion at homecoming, and the band director had a special request for one of them in particular.
“As head majorette in 1966,” Mom read, “we would be honored if you would lead the band onto the field at halftime, in whatever way you are comfortable.”
She looked up at us over her reading glasses, and her face was the face I remember from when I was little, right before she told us a secret.
“I’d like to twirl,” she said. “Just once. Just the old routine, the short one.”
That was when Teri laughed. Not a mean laugh, exactly.
More the laugh you give a child who says she is going to be an astronaut, the kind that pats you on the head.
“Mom, you’ll fall on your face,” she said. “Just wave from the bleachers. They’ll put your name on the board, everybody will clap, and nobody has to call an ambulance.”
Her daughter Kenzie, who is 24, laughed a little too, because her mother had. Then she looked down at her shoes like she wished she hadn’t.
My son Jesse, who is 16, didn’t laugh at all. He plays trumpet in that same band.
He just looked at his grandma and then at me, waiting to see what I would do.
Mom didn’t argue. She folded the letter in half, then in half again, and slid it into her pocket. Then she asked who wanted more tea, and that was the end of it.
But I saw her hand on that pocket. I saw it the whole rest of the evening, resting there, the way you would keep your hand on something you were afraid somebody might take.