The Sixty Fifth on the Church Lawn

The two of us

Vonda found me after the cake, behind the church, where I’d gone to throw the paper plates in the burn barrel. The sun was still high over the ridge. It was maybe four-thirty.

She stood there in her blue dress with her arms folded, and for a while she didn’t say anything at all.

“I called the cousins,” she said finally. “Both of them. I told them to stay away from him.”

“I know,” I said.

“I was going to sit in the car,” she said. “I drove down here and parked by the cemetery and I was going to just sit in the car and make sure he was all right and then go home. And then I heard everybody laughing.”

She shook her head.

“He remembered Elam,” she said. “He remembered a nickname from before I was born, and he can’t remember mine.”

“He answered to Dad,” I said. “He told you to hang on to the flowers. He knew whose you were, Von. He just couldn’t get the word out.”

She put her hand over her eyes. Her shoulders went.

I didn’t say I told you so. I didn’t say anything about the phone calls or the garden or the three years of Mom crying at the sink.

There wasn’t any point. She had stood at the edge of that lawn and heard it all already, louder than I could ever say it.

I just put my arm around my sister. And after a minute she leaned into it, the way she hasn’t since I was little and she was the one who held me.

“I’m sorry, Meg,” she said into my shoulder. “I’m sorry I left you to do all of it.”

“You’re here now,” I said.

“I’ll call him tomorrow,” she said. “The McAlisterville one. I’ll tell him I was wrong.”

“He’d like that,” I said. And she did. She called him the next afternoon, and he told me later he’d never heard Vonda Yoder say she was wrong about anything in fifty years.

Going home

The party went until almost six. The men from the fire company folded the tables and stacked the chairs, and Reuben loaded them back on his flatbed, and my husband pulled the tablecloths and bundled them for the Auxiliary to wash.

Elam’s granddaughter took him back to Ephrata. Before he got in the car, he and Dad held onto each other’s forearms one more time, and Elam said, “Next year, Clair.” And Dad said, “If the creek don’t rise.” That was what their fathers used to say.

Mom was worn out. Dad was worn out. He had been awake and smiling for four straight hours, longer than he’d sat up in months, and he was starting to look at the maples like he wasn’t sure where he was.

I was going to drive them. I had the keys in my hand.

But Vonda came over and held out her hand for them.

“I’ve got them,” she said. “You’ve done enough today. Go sit down. Eat a piece of your own cake.”

I gave her the keys.

I stood on the church lawn in my yellow sundress, in the long gold light of a June evening, and I watched my sister help our father into the front seat of my car.

She buckled his belt for him, the way you’d do for a child, and she said something that made him laugh.

Then she helped Mom into the back, and she set the white roses on Mom’s lap, and she went around and got behind the wheel.

I watched them go up the hill, slow, toward the ridge road and the stone farmhouse and the juncos at the feeder.

Vonda was the one who drove them home.