The Sixty Fifth on the Church Lawn

Getting ready

My husband drives a milk truck. He has hauled milk off half the farms in this county for nineteen years, and he knows every man at the fire hall by his first name and his coffee order.

He borrowed twenty folding tables from the fire company, and a hundred and twenty chairs from the fire company and the church together. He borrowed the big coffee urns too, and the white tablecloths the Ladies Auxiliary uses for the spring banquet.

Reuben, who rents Dad’s old ground and runs heifers on the back pasture, said he’d haul the tables down on his flatbed.

He wouldn’t take a dime for the diesel. “Clair taught me to back a wagon,” he said. “I figure I owe him a trip.”

Mom ironed Dad’s navy suit herself, the one he wore to every wedding and funeral for twenty years. She pressed the creases in the trousers at the kitchen table with a damp dish towel, the way her mother did it.

She bought herself a pale pink dress at the shop in Mifflintown. She tried it on for me in her bedroom and turned around once, slowly, and asked me if it was too much for an old woman.

“No, Mom,” I said. “It’s exactly enough.”

I told Dad on the Monday before. I sat with him on the porch while he shelled peas into a bowl, and I said, “Dad, on Saturday it’ll be sixty-five years since you married Mom. We’re having a party on the church lawn.”

He kept shelling. Then he looked at me and said, “Sixty-five. That can’t be right. I’m not that old.”

“You’re eighty-nine, Dad.”

He shook his head and laughed, and I laughed with him. Then he said, “Well. She was worth every one of them.” And he went back to shelling peas.

He asked me about it every day that week. “What’s Saturday?” he’d say.

And I’d tell him, and he’d say, “Sixty-five,” like it was a fresh surprise every time, and some days that broke my heart and some days it was the sweetest thing I ever heard.