The Toast Under Mom’s Maple

I stood up. I had my tea glass in my hand, sweet tea, half melted ice, and I held it out a little the way people do at weddings.

Rusty stood up next to me. He did not say a word. He just stood there with his hand on the back of my chair.

The talk around the table slowed down. People looked up. My aunt said, “Oh, a toast,” and smiled.

“I just want to say something for Mom’s birthday,” I said. “And to thank somebody.”

Mom smiled up at me.

“This year I raised six acres of burley on Mom’s creek bottom,” I said. “Most of you know that. Most of you know the hail took it. Rusty and I cut what was left by hand.”

People nodded. My uncle said, “That’s hard work, girl.”

“What I didn’t know,” I said, “is that somebody had insured my crop for me. And that the hail claim paid out. So I want to thank my sister Gina, for insuring my crop this year.”

A couple of the cousins smiled, like it was a sweet thing. My aunt said, “Well, isn’t that nice.”

“The claim paid twenty-three thousand dollars,” I said. “So thank you, Gina.”

I sat back down.

I do not know how to tell what the quiet was like. The cicadas kept on in the maple, louder than ever. A paper plate slid off the end of the table and nobody picked it up. Somebody’s baby fussed and stopped.

Gina set her fork down on her plate. She did not look up.

Steve looked at the grass.

Rusty stayed standing a second longer, then sat down beside me, and under the table he put his hand flat on my knee and left it there.

Mom had both of her hands in her lap. She looked at me for a long time, and I made myself look back at her. I had not said one word that was not true, and I had not raised my voice, and I was not going to look away now.

Then she turned and looked at Gina.

“Gina,” she said. “Is that so?”

Gina’s mouth opened. Nothing came out. Then she said, very small, “Mama, I was going to take care of it.”

Mom set her plate on the table and stood up out of her lawn chair. She is not a tall woman, and at seventy-five she is not quick, but every person at that table sat up straighter when she stood.

“Go get the folder out of your car,” she said. “The farm folder. The one you keep everything in.”

“Mama, not now.”

“Now, Gina.”

Gina got up. She walked across the yard to her car by the fence. We all watched her go. Nobody said anything. Steve started to get up too, and Mom said, “Sit down, Steve,” not unkind, and he sat.

Gina came back with a thick green accordion folder, the kind with the elastic band. She had carried it to every birthday and every Christmas for twelve years, because Mom always had some paper she needed signed.

Mom took it and opened it on the table, right there between the potato salad and the cake. She took her reading glasses out of her blouse pocket and put them on.

She went through it slow. The rest of us sat there. The cousins from Danville started to slip off toward the cars, and Mom said without looking up, “Everybody stay. This is family business, and you’re family.”