A green plastic cup half full of melted grape juice sat right beside my left elbow while a seven-year-old named Brayden used my paper napkin to wipe the neon green slime off his fingers. That was my seat at the Barren River family reunion this past June. A wobbly card table tucked away in the gravel corner behind the ice chest, far downwind from the good picnic tables where the Whitfields sat under the big oak tree.
Ronald had been gone fourteen months. Fourteen months since his heart gave out right there in our kitchen while he was reaching for a box of saltines, and the second we got him in the ground, the family warmth turned into a drafty hallway.
I was forty-one years married to that man, which apparently meant I was just the hired help who stuck around. One of Ronald’s sisters, Marsha, actually said it out loud at the fellowship hall after the funeral. She patted my arm with her cold little hand and told me not to worry about probate because I was just the wife.
So when I walked up to the pavilion at the lake house and saw my name card written in black Sharpie on a scrap of lined paper and taped to that little card table, I didn’t make a scene. I am sixty-four years old, and making a fuss never put food on a table or shingles on a roof. I just picked up my paper plate of potato salad, walked past the big oak tree where Ronald’s brothers were carving the brisket, and wedged myself between Brayden and a toddler who kept dropping cheerios in the grass.
I didn’t even mind the slime. A couple of the younger cousins, the ones who were too young to remember how Ronald and I slept on plywood floors when we started his contracting business back in nineteen-eighty-three, looked mortified. Little Sarah, cousin Dale’s girl, even brought her chair over and sat with me for an hour. I told her she was a good egg and gave her the extra deviled egg from my plate.
Across the lawn, Marsha poured herself another glass of sweet tea and laughed at something her brother said. They were so comfortable in that shade. They have been coming to this lake house for twenty summers, bringing their boats and their loud voices and their assumptions about how the world works. They talked about repairs they were going to make next year. They talked about which brother was going to take over Ronald’s old Ford truck like it was already parked in their own driveway.
They forgot a few things about how that lake house came to be. Ronald was a good man, hardworking as they come, but he had a habit of trusting his brothers too much until I stepped in with a ledger and a red pen. When we bought this plot of land back in two-thousand-and-four, the title company needed a signature. Ronald was busy on a commercial job in Bowling Green, so he told me to handle it. And because we were smart about things, and because Ronald knew how his family operated, we put the deed in one name only.
Mine. Just Gloria.
Same thing with the big brick house on Maple Street where we raised our kids and where Ronald’s sister Marsha always acted like she had a standing reservation for her retirement years. Deeded solely to Gloria in nineteen-ninety-eight, right after we paid off the second mortgage with money I saved from running the office books out of a damp basement.
I sat there at that card table until three in the afternoon, eating my potato salad and watching them pass the platter around like they owned the ground beneath their lawn chairs. I even helped Brayden stretch his slime across the corner of the card table. Marsha walked by once to toss an empty water bottle into the trash bin and didn’t even look down at me. She just said, “Hold on to that cup for me, Gloria,” and kept walking.
I told myself I could give them one last weekend. One last time to sit under that oak tree and feel like lords of the county. Because I knew, and my lawyer Delia knew, that the calendar was turning.
On Monday morning at eight-forty-five, I parked my Buick right in front of Delia’s office on Main Street. Delia has been practicing law in this county since before the interstate was paved, and she doesn’t have much patience for fools who think a last name makes up for a lack of a deed. I walked into her office, dropped my canvas purse on the corner of her wooden desk, and laid two manila folders right on top of her blotter.
Delia looked up from her bifocals, took one look at my face, and didn’t even ask how my weekend was. She just reached out a hand and tapped the top folder. “Those the ones?” she asked.
“Both of them,” I said.
Delia opened the first one, the lake house survey from two-thousand-and-four, and ran her thumb down the margin where my signature sat alone in black ink. She let out a little whistle, the kind she makes when she’s about to enjoy an afternoon of paperwork. “They’re still using it every July, aren’t they?” she asked.
“They just finished the brisket yesterday,” I told her.
Delia nodded slowly, pulled her yellow legal pad toward her, and picked up her favorite pilot pen. “What do you want me to do with them, Gloria? We can start with a notice to vacate, or we can go straight for the trespass filings if they set foot on the property after August first.”
I sat back in the leather chair, feeling the cool air conditioning hit the back of my neck after the heavy humidity of the lake. I thought about Marsha standing under that oak tree. I thought about the way Ronald’s brothers looked at my plate like I was charity. And then I thought about Sarah, that sweet girl who brought her chair over to the card table and didn’t care about last names.
“I want certified letters sent to every single one of them by Friday,” I told Delia, leaning forward so she could hear me plain. “Tell them the lease on their family nostalgia is officially canceled.”
Delia stopped writing and looked up, her pencil hovering over the yellow paper. “All of them?” she asked.
“Every last one,” I said, “except for Sarah and her daddy Dale. Their names stay on the new gate keys.”
Delia grinned a slow, tight grin and started writing the first address. Outside the window, the post office clock struck nine, and I didn’t look back once.
