The Last Checks Mom Handed Out at the Lake

Dad

I should say something about my father, because some of you are wondering where the men were in all this.

Dad was Frank Rowland. He ran the grain scale at the MFA elevator in Tipton for twenty-eight years and he died in the spring of twenty-nineteen of a heart attack in the pole barn behind this very house. He was seventy.

He was not a talker. But he had a way of saying a hard thing once, quietly, and then never bringing it up again. When Gwen wrecked his truck at seventeen he said, “You’ll pay for the bumper out of your Hardee’s money,” and that was the end of it. She paid for the bumper.

“Dad would have said something,” I told Mom.

“Your dad would have said it once,” Mom said, “and he would have said it to their faces, and he would have said it kindly. That’s what I’m going to do.”

My own husband, Paul, runs a hay operation outside town with his brother. When I got home that night and showed him the legal pad, he read it twice and set it on the tailgate of his truck.

“You want me to talk to Ken?” he asked. Paul and Ken have known each other since 4-H.

“Mom says no,” I said. “Mom says it’s hers to say.”

Paul nodded slowly. “Then you drive her,” he said. “And I’ll keep supper warm.”

Why the Picnic

I’ll be honest. When Mom told me where she wanted to do it, I argued with her.

The Hidden Hollow Cove Association holds a picnic every Labor Day on the shore lawn by the community docks. Every cabin owner in the cove comes. There’s a pig on the smoker, a table of covered dishes, horseshoes, and kids jumping off the swim dock until their lips turn blue.

“Mom, there’ll be fifty people there,” I said. “You don’t have to do this in front of the whole cove.”

“I’m not doing it in front of the whole cove,” she said. “I’m doing it where my daughters are. It’s the one day all summer the two of them are in the same place at the same time. And it’s the one day nobody can tell me not to come, because the flyer says all family welcome.”

She had a point, and she knew it. She hadn’t been asked down once that summer.

“I’m not going to make a scene,” she added. “I’ve never made a scene in my life. I had twenty-four eight-year-olds in a room for thirty-one years and I never once raised my voice. I’m going to hand my girls an envelope, and I’m going to come home.”

On the first of September she wrote the two checks the way she always did, in blue ink, in cursive, and entered them in the register.

Then, for the first time in thirty-six months, she did not put them in the mailbox.

She sat on the porch steps with two plain white envelopes and her good pen and wrote a note for each one on her old school stationery, the cream-colored kind with the apple in the corner. She did not show me what she wrote. I did not ask.