The Toast Under Mom’s Maple

I have not lost it. It sits on the shelf over my washer, and every paper that comes for Mom’s farm goes in it, and I am learning what twelve years of Gina’s Saturdays looked like.

It is a lot. I understand that now in a way I did not before.

September went by. The tobacco cured in the barn, slow and brown, the leaves going from green to yellow to that deep red-brown you want, even the torn ones. I went out to the barn on weekends and looked up at it and breathed it in.

Gina did not call. Mom said she had been by twice, both times when I was at school. Mom said she looked thin.

Rusty said, “Give her time.”

On the third Saturday of October we had a damp morning, the first real one of the fall, the fog lying in the creek bottom and the air thick. That is the kind of morning tobacco comes in case, soft enough to handle without it crumbling.

Rusty and Aaron and I were at the barn by seven, taking sticks down out of the tiers and stacking them on the wagon to haul to the stripping room. Mom had walked down from the house with her coffee and was sitting on an overturned bucket by the barn door, watching.

That is where Gina found us.

She came down the lane on foot from the house, in her jeans and an old flannel shirt of Daddy’s I had not seen in years. She stopped at the barn door and looked at Mom, and then at me.

“Can I help?” she said.

Rusty looked at me. Aaron looked at me. I did not know what to say, so I handed her a pair of gloves.

We worked about an hour. She took sticks from Rusty and handed them to me, and I stacked them on the wagon, the way we used to as girls when Daddy would let us help, the two of us in a line passing sticks hand to hand. Nobody talked much. The fog burned off.

When the wagon was full, Gina took off the gloves and reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out a check folded in half.

“Mama,” she said. “You said in front of you.”

Mom set her coffee cup down on the ground and stood up off her bucket.

Gina unfolded the check and held it out to me. It was made out to Shannon Cundiff, for twenty-three thousand dollars, and in the memo line in her neat, careful handwriting she had written, “Burley, creek bottom. Your crop.”

“Steve sold the other truck,” she said. “And we’re closing the business at the end of the year. He’s taking a job with the hospital in Danville, maintenance, with insurance. It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be smaller, but it’s going to be all right.”

I looked at the check. I looked at my sister, at the gray coming in at her temples that I had not noticed, at the shadows under her eyes.

“I can’t take all of this, Gina.”

“You can,” she said. “You’re going to. Mama said whole. It’s whole.”

Mom said, “Take it, Shannon.”

I took it. My hand was shaking. I folded it once and put it in the pocket of my shirt.

Then I said the thing I had been thinking about since August, standing on those porch steps.

“I’ve had the folder for two months,” I said. “I don’t know what half of it is. I didn’t know how much you were doing. I never thanked you. Not once in twelve years.”