The Last Checks Mom Handed Out at the Lake

Labor Day

Labor Day was hot and clear, the kind of late-summer Missouri afternoon where the sky looks rinsed and the grass along the highway has gone the color of a lion.

I picked Mom up at noon. She was waiting on the porch steps in gray slacks and that pale yellow cardigan, with her purse on her lap and the two envelopes inside it.

“You’ll roast in that sweater,” I said.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s the one they know me in.”

We drove south on Highway 5 through Versailles, past the Amish produce stand with the hand-painted sign for sweet corn, past the turnoff to the Mennonite bakery, down through Gravois Mills where the road starts to dip and twist toward the water.

Mom was quiet most of the way. Once, around the bridge, she said, “Your father used to bring us down here when you were little. You girls would fight over who got to sit by the window.”

“I always lost,” I said.

“You always let them win,” she said. “That’s not the same thing.”

I’ve thought about that sentence a lot since.

The Shore Lawn

The Hidden Hollow cove sits at about the four mile marker of the Gravois arm. You come in through a gate, wind down a chip-and-seal road through the oaks, and then the trees open up and there’s the shore lawn, green and mowed, sloping down to the water.

There were three long gray docks that day, with a couple of white runabouts tied up in the slips and a few more boats along the far shore. A row of picnic tables sat empty near the water under a big shade tree. Way back at the top of the lawn, more tables were lined up under the oaks by the smoker, with people crowded around them.

I parked at the top of the lawn and came around to help Mom out. She didn’t need the help. She took my arm anyway.

Gwen saw us first.

She was standing out on the open grass near the docks with a glass of iced tea, wearing a wide-brim straw sun hat and a white linen shirt, her frosted blonde hair hanging loose under the brim the way she’s worn it since high school.

She set the tea on a dock post and came across the lawn toward us with her arms already out.

“Mom! You didn’t tell me you were coming,” she said, and she hugged Mom, and then she looked over Mom’s shoulder at me.

It was the look she has given me since I was six years old. The baby. The one who stayed in Tipton. The one who works at the drugstore.

“Tami brought me,” Mom said.

“Well, isn’t that nice,” Gwen said. “There’s brisket. Sue brought her potato salad. Come sit down, Mom, it’s too hot to stand out here in a sweater.”

“In a minute, honey,” Mom said. “I brought you something first.”