That reunion was on the second Saturday in June, at the Brandt family farm outside Rogersville. It belongs to my husband Josh’s Uncle Gene. Every summer, the whole Brandt clan comes from all over Missouri and Arkansas: forty or fifty people, folding tables under the pecan trees, a smoker going since four in the morning, kids running wild in the hayfield, and the old men fishing off the dock.
It’s the kind of family event where everybody’s happy and nobody looks too closely at anything.
My father wasn’t a Brandt. He came because Josh invited him. Every year since my mother died, Josh has called him in May and said, “Leon, you’re coming to the reunion. Gene’s smoking a brisket, and I need somebody who can actually catch a fish.”
Dad always came. He always brought a pecan pie from the bakery in Ozark, because he never learned to bake after Mom passed, and he always stood a little off to the side, smiling, not quite part of it but glad to be asked.
I want you to understand that he was a guest. He was invited. And my mother-in-law pushed him into a pond.
Josh was up the hill helping Uncle Gene with the brisket when it happened. He heard the splash and the silence after it and came running down through the pecan trees with a pair of barbecue tongs still in his hand.
By the time he reached the dock, I already had Dad out of the water.
“What happened?” Josh said, breathing hard. “Leon, you okay?”
“He can’t hear you,” I said. “His hearing aids are gone.”
Josh looked at Dad, soaking wet and patting his ears. Then he looked at the dock.
His mother was still standing at the end of it with her paper plate, her coral lipstick perfect, her hair sprayed into its usual blond helmet.
“It was a joke, Joshie,” Cindy said, and laughed. “I didn’t push him that hard. How was I supposed to know he had those things in? Everybody takes their stuff out before they go near the water.”
“He wasn’t going near the water, Mom. He was standing on the dock.”
“Well, he should’ve been more careful.”
Josh’s face went tight. I watched him swallow whatever he wanted to say. Forty relatives were watching, and that’s a lot of eyes on a man about to yell at his mother at his own family reunion.
I knew what everybody was thinking, because I was thinking it too. Nobody calls the sheriff over a family reunion. Nobody calls a lawyer because somebody’s mother-in-law got silly on a dock. She was Josh’s mother. If this got fixed, it would have to be fixed by us.
“Let’s find them,” Josh said.
He kicked off his shoes, rolled up his jeans, and waded into the pond. Two of his cousins, Tyler and Brent, followed him in without being asked. All afternoon and into the evening, the three of them walked the bottom of that pond with their bare feet, shuffling slowly through the mud in a line, feeling for anything small and hard.
