The Sixty Fifth on the Church Lawn

“He won’t remember it, Meg,” my sister said. “He won’t remember a single minute of it. So what is the point?”

She said it at Mom’s kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon in March, with the sun coming in low across the oilcloth and the coffee going cold in front of all three of us.

Dad was in his recliner in the next room, close enough to hear if he had been listening. He wasn’t. He was watching the juncos at the feeder outside the front window, the way he did most afternoons now.

Mom had her hands folded around her cup. She was 87 that spring. Her knuckles were swollen from sixty years of milking and canning and wringing out dishrags, and she held the cup like it was the only warm thing in the house.

I had only said one sentence before Vonda answered me. I had said, “Their 65th is the second week of June, and I think we ought to do something.”

“Do what?” Vonda said. “Rent a hall? Put Dad in a room full of people he doesn’t know and watch him try to figure out who they are? That isn’t a party, Meg. That is cruel.”

“They’re not strangers,” I said. “They’re his people.”

“They are strangers to him now,” she said. “Or they will be by June. You don’t see him every day like I do.”

That wasn’t true. Mom saw him every day. Vonda lived twelve minutes away and stopped in on Tuesdays and Sundays. I lived twenty minutes away and stopped in on Wednesdays and Saturdays and whenever Mom called. But I didn’t say any of that.

Vonda is ten years older than me. She is 58, and she has been the oldest her whole life, and she has always been the one who decides.

When we were girls she decided which of us dried and which of us washed. She was right about most things, which made it worse when she was wrong.

“I’m not going to help with it,” she said. “I’m telling you now so you don’t count on me. I think it’s a mistake, and I’m not going to be part of it.”

Mom set her cup down very carefully, the way you set something down when your hands are shaking and you don’t want anybody to see.

“Girls,” she said. That was all. Just “girls.”

I looked at her face and I knew how this would go if I pushed. Vonda would raise her voice. I would raise mine.

And afterward, after Vonda’s car went down the lane, Mom would stand at the sink and cry with the water running so Dad wouldn’t hear.

That was how every argument with Vonda had ended for the last three years. Every single one. Over the doctor, over the stair lift, over whether Dad should still be allowed to drive the lawn tractor. Somebody won, and Mom cried.

So I didn’t argue. I said, “All right, Vonda,” and I picked up the cups and I washed them, and I decided right there at the sink that I would do it myself.