Coins

Inez, seated on a rollator, a once-hearty figure who birthed six sons and kept her ranch house pin-neat, greets all who enter the church pavilion. Neddie gives her a coin for being the oldest at this year’s family gathering. Inez fingers the bas-relief of Sacagawea, who traversed peaks vastly higher than these Brushy Mountains. Red-haired Issac races barefoot up table rows, his Crocs parked on a ledge near his weary mother. Men mulling the cost of hay rein him in when he knocks over a cup of iced tea. Neddie kneels, offers him a coin for being the youngest. The boy runs to his great-aunt Inez and they tap coins, ninety years between them. Next, Charles accepts and pockets a coin for traveling the farthest. Home from a tour of duty, he is Malcolm’s son, and cousins Reba and Dee Anne still call him Chucky. He’s given up on love, unaware that after discharge next year, he will meet a widow with two children. Marcus and Dula share the last coin for being married the longest. Marcus jokes he didn’t think they’d make it past the first six months. Dula knows they had to iron out every one of those 66 years, like she did his Sunday shirts, so Jesus could keep washing them clean. It was a perfect day, from Callie’s opening prayer to the ball cap stuffed with wallet money that would help pay her scholarship to Valley Tech. In between, they ate iron-skillet fried chicken, Mitzi’s mother’s broccoli casserole, meringue pies, and coconut cakes as light as the whipped high hairdos of the ladies who’d planned it all. Afterward, Charles walked among the graves his grandfather once mowed after working in the fields. He found the brass plate for his cousin Nancy, who died last year; with room for her Barry to one day rest at her side. Family, living and dead, waiting to be reunited. All looking over the Brushy Mountains on a cool and sunny September day.