The Toast Under Mom’s Maple

“Something’s more than nothing,” he said. “Your daddy used to say that.”

School started back on the twelfth. I went back to my kitchen and my sheet pans and my two hundred and eighty little ones coming through the line with their trays. It helped, honestly. Children do not care about your troubles. They want to know if it is chicken nugget day.

Gina called me twice in those weeks. Both times she asked about the tobacco. Both times I said, “We got some of it in.”

The second time she said, “I’m so sorry, Shan. I know how hard you worked.”

I held the phone a long time after that. I believe she meant it. That was the worst part.

Mom’s seventy-fifth was the last Saturday in August. Gina planned it, the way she plans everything. Folding tables in the front yard under the big maple Daddy planted the year they married. Lawn chairs from the church. A sheet cake from the Kroger in Harrodsburg with yellow roses.

There were twenty-six of us by the time everybody got there. Mom’s two sisters and their husbands. Cousins from Danville and Lawrenceburg. Gina and Steve and their two girls. Rusty and Aaron and me. Mom’s neighbor from down the road, a widower she plays cards with on Thursdays.

It was hot, the way late August is hot in Kentucky, close and still, the cicadas going in the maple so loud you had to lean in to talk. People sat in the shade and fanned themselves with paper plates.

Gina hugged me when she got out of the car. She smelled like the same perfume she has worn since high school.

“You look tired, Shan,” she said.

“Tobacco’ll do that,” I said.

She laughed a little and let go. Over her shoulder I saw Steve carrying a cooler from the car, and when he looked up and saw me, he looked away.

That told me he knew.

We ate. Fried chicken, Mom’s sister’s potato salad, green beans cooked all morning with a ham hock, sliced tomatoes off Mom’s own vines with salt and pepper. Deviled eggs. Somebody brought a jam cake like Mom’s mother used to make.

Mom sat at the head of the long table in her good blue blouse and laughed at her sisters and held the youngest cousin’s baby on her lap. She looked happy. I almost changed my mind right there.

After the food Gina’s girls lit the candles. Seventy-five of them, crowded onto that sheet cake so thick it looked like a little forest fire. Everybody sang. Mom laughed and said she would need the fire department.

She leaned over and blew. She got maybe half of them. Aaron leaned in beside her and helped with the rest, and everybody clapped, and Mom grabbed his face in both hands and kissed his cheek.

Then, while the cake was being cut, the talk turned to the hail, the way it always does in July and August when farmers get together.

Mom’s brother-in-law asked Rusty how bad his place had got it. Rusty said not bad, a few acres torn. Then my uncle turned to me.

“I heard yours got it bad, Shannon. Down on the bottom.”

“Pretty bad,” I said.

“Well, I hope you had insurance on it,” he said. “Hail like that, you’d be crazy not to.”

I looked down the table at Gina. She had gotten very busy with her fork.

I felt Rusty go still beside me.