The Slap At The Reunion

She slapped me in front of my kids and called me a fake mother not knowing I was the one saving her farm

The sound of it came before the sting. That is the thing nobody tells you about being hit in the face by a grown woman in front of fifty people. You hear the crack first, flat and wet, bouncing off the side of the barn, and your whole body understands what happened a half second before your cheek does. Then the heat blooms up under your eye, and the yard that had been loud with children and lawn chairs and the radio playing out of Wade’s truck goes dead quiet.

I was forty-three years old. I had never once in my life been struck by another person. And the woman who did it was my sister-in-law, Sherry, standing there in her good white blouse with her hand still half raised, breathing hard, while my daughter Abby held onto the back of my shirt with both fists.

“You are not her mother,” Sherry said. Loud. So everybody would hear it clean. “You will never be her real mother. You just signed some papers and bought yourself a family because God wouldn’t give you one.”

I want to tell you I said something sharp back. I have gone over it a thousand times since, the things a smarter woman would have said, the way my own mother would have cut her down to the ground with four quiet words. But I didn’t say anything. I stood in the grass on my brother’s farm with my hand coming up slow to my own face, and I looked at my two children, and all I could think was that they had heard every word of it.

Let me back up. You need to know how we got to that backyard, because the slap is not the story. The slap is just the part everybody saw.

My name is Dana. I grew up outside Sparta, Tennessee, on the kind of road that still turns to gravel when the county runs out of money, which is most years. Pine Hollow Road. My daddy ran cattle and cut hay on ninety acres his own daddy cleared, and my brother Wade runs what is left of it now. I was the older one by four years. I was the one who was supposed to be steady.

I got steady early. I had to.

I married a good man named Tom when I was twenty-six. Tom drove a propane truck for the co-op and coached the middle school baseball team for no pay, and he had a laugh you could hear across a parking lot. We wanted children the way some people want air. We tried for nine years. I will not walk you through all of it, the doctors in Cookeville and then the specialist in Nashville, the shots I gave myself in the bathroom before work, the three times I got far enough along to pick a name and then lost it. I buried a piece of myself each time, quiet, where nobody could see. Tom held me and said we had each other and that was a whole life right there. And it was. It truly was.