On the first Saturday in July, three weeks after the reunion, I drove over to Dad’s house to help him clean out his gutters. He insists on doing it himself every summer, and I insist on holding the ladder.
When I pulled into his driveway, there was a white Buick Enclave parked out front.
My stomach dropped.
I parked behind it and walked around to the backyard. Dad was sitting in one of his old green metal lawn chairs on the patio, wearing his new hearing aids, with Duke asleep at his feet.
Across from him, in the other lawn chair, sat Cindy.
She wasn’t wearing the turquoise sundress. She was wearing jeans and an old Rogersville Wildcats sweatshirt, with hardly any makeup on. Her hair wasn’t done. There was a pecan pie on the little patio table between them, in a store container from the same bakery in Ozark where Dad buys his.
They both looked up when I came around the corner.
“Hey, sis,” Dad said, at a perfectly normal volume.
“Hi, Daddy.” I looked at Cindy. “Cindy.”
“Kayla.” She looked down at her hands.
“Pull up a chair,” Dad said. “Cindy was just telling me something.”
I sat down slowly on the edge of the brick planter. Duke lifted his head, sniffed my shoe, and went back to sleep.
Cindy didn’t look at me. She looked at Dad.
“I was telling him,” she said, in a small voice I’d never heard from her, “that I’m sorry. For pushing him. And for laughing. And for not calling to see if he was okay.”
Dad nodded slowly.
“And I brought this.” She reached into the pocket of her sweatshirt and pulled out a white envelope. She set it on the table beside the pie and pushed it toward Dad with one finger. “It’s eight hundred dollars. It’s not the whole thing. I know it’s not. It’s what I got back when I returned the sundresses and the hat, plus what I had in my savings. I’ll send more when I can.”
Dad looked at the envelope. He didn’t pick it up.
“Cindy,” he said gently, “I don’t want your money.”
“I know you don’t,” she said, and her eyes filled up. “But I want to give it to you. Josh said something to me in my front yard. He said I’ve been careless with people my whole life and everybody always cleaned up after me.” She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “He’s right. I have been. And I don’t want my son to be ashamed of me.”
Nobody said anything for a while. A mockingbird started singing somewhere in Dad’s pecan tree. Dad tilted his head toward it, just a little, and smiled.
Then he picked up the envelope, turned in his chair, and held it out to me.
“Sis,” he said. “This is family money. You know where it goes.”
I looked at him. Then at Cindy.
Then I took the envelope.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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