The Birthday in Grandpa’s Hayloft

What the mothers saw

Around twenty to three the cake was down to the corners. Sherman’s mother, Tasha Greer, found me at the bale table with a paper plate in her hand and a look I could not read.

“Can I tell you something?” she said. “You don’t have to say anything back.”

I said of course.

“We pulled into the rink lot first. Sherman is on Kaylee’s invitation too, and I thought we might stop at both. We got there at twenty to two, early, because I never trust a parking lot.”

She turned the plate a quarter turn in her fingers.

“I could see straight through the glass doors. The whole floor was empty. Three kids in rented skates and one woman in a good wool coat, standing by a table of pizza with her arms folded.”

I did not say a word.

“I sat in the car about a minute,” Tasha said. “Then I put it in reverse and came here. I wanted you to know it wasn’t a hard choice.”

Before the last candle was out I had heard some version of it from five more mothers. Two had made the same turn in the same lot. One had circled the rink twice, trying to be fair, and then followed the hay wagon sign Ken had stapled to the mailbox post.

Nobody said it unkindly. Nobody said Dana’s name above a murmur. They simply set it down in front of me, one mother at a time, the way you hand a person a casserole dish she will have to return.

I thought I would feel something bright. I stood in my grandfather’s barn with thirty-one children screaming at the top of the hay and I felt sick to my stomach.

I pictured Kaylee on that empty floor. Nine years old, in skates a size too big, watching the door for forty minutes. That is the part I could not set down.

So I did what my mother taught me. I said thank you, and I gave each of them a second slice of cake, and I did not repeat a word of it to anyone.

What my sister had been carrying

I want to go back a few years, because I worked it out slowly, over that weekend, and I would like you to have it in order.

Dana is three years older than me. She is thirty-seven now. She is tall and pretty and quick, and from the time we were little she was the one who got noticed first.

She won the spelling bee, and the pageant, and a scholarship, and she married a man with a good job in Columbia. I was the shadow. Grandma June and Grandpa Homer kept us both every summer, and I was always out at the barn in rubber boots, following my grandfather around.

Dana did not like the barn. She said it smelled. She said tractors were for boys. She said she would be somebody someday and it would not be out here.

She was somebody. She moved to Nashville at eighteen and she was gone seventeen years.