The Name I Read From the Bleachers

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was at my house that year, the way it has been since Mom died.

Dolores brought the sweet potatoes and the green bean casserole. My kids came in from Wichita and Salina with the grandkids.

Lonnie did not come. Dolores said he was home and would eat later. I did not ask any more than that.

I set a place for him anyway, because my mother always set a place for whoever might come, and I did not see a reason to stop now.

We ate at one in the afternoon. Dad said the blessing, short and plain the way he likes it, thanking the Lord for the food and the hands that made it and the ones who could not be at the table.

At about half past two, with the dishes stacked and the football on low in the front room, I looked out the kitchen window and saw a pickup far down the section line road, a mile and a quarter south, heading for Dad’s place.

Dad had insisted on going home after dinner to rest. Dolores had driven him and come back.

I could see his place from my kitchen, because I live a mile and a quarter north on the same section line road, and it was such a clear day you could see the elevator in town.

The pickup slowed at Dad’s mailbox and turned in. It was Lonnie’s.

I got my coat. Dolores was already standing at the door with hers on. She did not say anything. She just held out my keys.

We drove down together. By the time we pulled into the yard, Lonnie was on Dad’s porch with a pie in his hands, and Dad was standing in the open door in his stocking feet and his cardigan, looking at him.

We stayed in the car. Dolores turned off the engine and we both rolled our windows down an inch, and I am not ashamed of that, because I would do it again.

Lonnie held the pie out. It was a pumpkin pie in one of Dolores’s glass dishes, and the crust was lopsided on one side, which is how I knew he had made it himself, because my sister has never made a lopsided crust in her life.

“I made it,” Lonnie said. “Dolores showed me. It’s probably not any good.”

Dad looked at the pie. Then he looked at Lonnie. Then he looked past him, south, across the yard, toward the line between their two quarters, where the new posts still stood thirty feet south of where Lonnie had once put them.