The Toast Under Mom’s Maple

The twenty-fourth. I thought back. That was the day I had taken Aaron to the orthodontist in Lexington. When I came home that evening, Mom had said Gina had been out with “a man from the insurance about the barn roof.”

The barn roof had taken some hail too. That much was true.

That night I sat on the tailgate of Rusty’s truck in Mom’s barn lot and told him. He listened all the way through without a word, which is how I knew how angry he was.

“I’ll go see her,” he said.

“No.”

“Shannon. That is your crop. That is your summer. I’ll go see her and Steve both, and I’ll be polite about it, but I’m going.”

Steve is Gina’s husband. He has a small heating and air business in town, two trucks and three employees. I knew it had been struggling. Everybody in the family knew. Nobody said it out loud.

“If you go to her house,” I said, “Steve will meet you at the door, and it’ll be the two of you in the driveway, and then it’s a war. And it’s still on Mom’s farm. It’s still Mom’s name under all of it.”

He thought about that. Rusty is not a hothead. He just does not like to see people do wrong to me.

“What about the agent?” he said. “Or the county office. Tell them the operator’s wrong.”

“And then what?” I said. “Then it’s fraud. Then somebody from the government comes out to Mom’s farm with a clipboard, and it’s her farm number on it, and her seventy-five years old. Gina put her own name on it, but she put it on Mom’s land.”

He looked out at the barn a long time. “So what do you want to do?”

“I want to tell it once,” I said. “In front of family. Out loud. Not to the government, not to a lawyer. To Mom. And then let Mom decide what kind of family she has.”

“When?”

“Her birthday,” I said. “Everybody’ll be there.”

He did not like it. I could see him turning it over, looking for the place it would go wrong. Finally he nodded.

“I’ll be standing right beside you,” he said. “Whatever happens.”

I want to be honest about those next weeks. I was not a saint about it. I lay awake. I said things about my sister in my head that I would not say out loud. I cut tobacco angry, and I believe some of those plants felt it.

But I also kept thinking about Gina at Daddy’s bedside. Gina doing Mom’s taxes every spring at that card table in her spare room while her own kids did homework at the other end. Gina calling me every week when Aaron was born early.

And I thought about Steve’s trucks. One of them had been sitting in their driveway for a month with no lettering on the door anymore, like somebody had peeled it off to sell it.

None of that made it right. But all of it made it hers, the way a sickness is somebody’s.

We finished cutting on the ninth of August. Of six acres, we housed a little over a third. It hung in the barn ragged and uneven, but it hung. The barn smelled like it should, sweet and green and turning.

Rusty stood under the tiers with me the last evening and looked up.

“It’ll cure,” he said. “Not pretty, but it’ll cure. You’ll get something for it.”

“Something,” I said.