I was holding the cherry pie when Hunter said it. I had baked it at five that morning before a half shift at the lab, and the top crust had come out right for once.
The Fourth of July cookout at the home place always ran the same way.
Jeff on the grill, Mom in a lawn chair in the shade of the hedge tree, and the long picnic table pushed up against the pasture fence.
Noreen had put the red-checked plastic cloth on it and set a little flag in a canning jar in the middle. Blue-rimmed picnic plates, a stack of paper napkins, a bowl of potato salad sweating in the heat.
It was a bright July afternoon, the kind mid-Missouri gives you about ten times a summer. The fescue on the other side of the fence was still green from a wet spring.
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Somebody, I think one of Noreen’s cousins, asked whether Neil and I were “still thinking about kids.” People asked that the way they asked about the weather, like it was a polite thing to say.
Before I could answer, Hunter said, loud enough for the whole table, “Aunt Liz should just keep trying.” He was sixteen. He said it with a grin, the way he says everything.
Jeff laughed. He had come off the grill and was sitting at the table in his navy T-shirt, a burger in one hand and his gray ball cap pushed back, his face sunburned from cutting hay all week. “Maybe next year, buddy,” he said. “Maybe next year.”
A couple of people laughed with him. Most of them looked at their plates. I stood there beside the table in my white sleeveless blouse with the pie in both hands and kept my face still.
I have worked in a hospital lab for fifteen years. I know how to keep my face still.
You learn it the first time you run a blood count on a child and see the number before the doctor does.
Neil was down at the far end of the table, out past the potato salad. He did not make a scene. He set his plate down, and he said, quiet and level, “That’s enough, Jeff.”
Jeff waved the burger like he was shooing a fly. “Aw, we’re just having fun. She knows that.” He looked at me. “You know that, Lizzie.”
I set the pie down on the checked cloth, next to the flag in the jar.
I took the knife Noreen had laid out and cut the pie into twelve pieces, even ones, the way Mom taught me when I was nine.
Then I put the knife down, wiped my hands on a napkin, and walked out along the pasture fence until the voices behind me were just noise.
Neil caught up with me at the corner post a minute later. He did not say anything. He just walked beside me with his hand on my back until I was ready to go back.