The Toast Under Mom’s Maple

Then Mom pushed the folder across the table to me and sat down in her lawn chair and picked up her fork.

“Now,” she said. “Somebody give me a piece of my own birthday cake before it melts.”

The cousins laughed, the shaky kind of laugh that lets a yard breathe again. My aunt cut Mom a corner piece with two yellow roses on it. The baby started fussing again. The cicadas had never stopped.

Gina did not stay much longer. She hugged Mom by the car. She did not hug me, and I did not go to her. I watched her girls climb in the back seat and look at me through the window, and I felt something I can only describe as grief.

When most people had gone, I was folding the church chairs and stacking them by the porch steps when Mom came over and sat down on the bottom step.

“Come here a minute,” she said.

I sat down beside her. The sun was going down behind the maple, and the yard smelled like cut grass and candle smoke.

“You could have gone to the county office,” she said. “You could have gone to a lawyer. Why didn’t you?”

“Because it’s your farm,” I said. “Your name was under all of it. If I’d turned her in, they’d have come to you first. I wasn’t going to give you that for your birthday.”

She was quiet a while.

“You gave me something worse,” she said. “You gave me the truth in front of my sisters.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “I’d rather have it in my front yard than in a government letter. You did it the way your daddy would have done it. Out loud, one time, and then leave it.”

She took my hand. Hers is thin now, the knuckles big, but it is still strong. She turned my palm up and looked at it, at the calluses from the knife and the stick.

“You cut all that by hand,” she said.

“What was left of it.”

“Is it curing?”

“It’s curing. Ugly, but curing.”

She smiled a little. “Then I want something. When you strip it this winter, I want you to save me a hand. One hand of that leaf, tied the way your daddy tied it. I want to hang it by my back door.”

“It’s not good tobacco, Mom. It’s torn all to pieces.”

“I know it is,” she said. “That’s why I want it. It’s the crop that came through.”

I put my head on her shoulder the way I did when I was a girl, and we sat there on the porch steps until the lightning bugs came up out of the yard.

Monday morning we went to the county office, Mom and Rusty and me. The same clerk was there, and she was kind about it. Mom did the talking. We sat in plastic chairs for most of a morning and signed a stack of papers, and the agent came over from his office, and it got set right the way those things get set right, slowly.

I will not tell all of that part, because it was paperwork, and paperwork is not a story. What matters is that when we walked out into the parking lot, Mom handed me the green folder and said, “It’s yours now. Don’t lose it.”