Nadine Set A Cleaning Bucket Beside My Reunion Supper

Nadine put the bucket beside my chair before she set out the rolls.

"We all need to earn our supper, Maureen. Cabins four through seven need doing."

Twenty-three people sat under the cottonwoods behind the lodge. My fork rested on a paper napkin. Across the table, my granddaughter Tess stopped cutting a peach.

"The reunion guests used those cabins," I said.

"And someone has to clean up after them."

Nadine smiled toward the cousins. She made it sound like a joke I had spoiled by asking a question.

At seventy, I was a freckled Irish American woman with a white braid, broad hands, and a back bent a little by years at the wheel. I had retired from teaching ceramics, not from feeding myself.

I kept that thought behind my teeth.

Nadine was forty-five, a white American woman with a sleek blond bob, pale pink nails, and a linen suit that never seemed to crease. She had placed herself at the head of the table beneath a banner that read FAMILY BUILDS EVERYTHING.

My late husband had built that table. I had bought its wood.

"There's food for you afterward," she said. "We saved plenty."

I slipped my hand into my pocket. My worry stone was clay, fired smooth, with a shallow crescent where my thumb fit. I had made it from the same batch as my first set of test tiles.

In clay, a test tile told the truth before a whole pot went into the kiln.

I had come to Kanab, Utah, for a family meal. Instead, I had been handed a test.

My son Evan came out of the kitchen carrying ice.

"What's going on?"

"Your mother offered to help," Nadine said.

"I didn't," I said.

He looked at the bucket, then toward the cousins.

"Can we talk later, Mom? It's been a long day."

It had been a long two years since Daniel died. Evan had taken over Red Wash Cabins, the business his father left him. Nadine handled its office. I lived in my own little house in town, but she spoke of me as though I slept under their stairs.

"Don't fuss over a bucket," she said. "Dan would want you involved."

The name struck harder than the order.

I stood. Tess started to stand too.

"Eat your supper, sweetheart," I told her.

I carried the bucket toward the cabins. I wanted to see what Nadine had done with my classroom.

The lodge stood just outside Kanab, where red banks rose beyond the roofs and fine sand found every screen. My mother had left me those nine acres when the road was still rough gravel. Daniel later built seven cabins and a lodge on them.

His name appeared on the cream stationery in the office. Mine appeared on papers kept elsewhere.

My brother Seamus had called before I left home.

"Bring the blue folder," he had said.

"To a reunion?"

"Especially to a reunion."

The folder lay under the spare tire cover in my car. Seamus and I both signed the trust papers. He liked to say that two signatures helped protect us from one soft heart.

I had been the soft heart.

In cabin four, towels lay in a heap beside the shower. A little lizard waited outside the screen. I made the bed and wiped the sink. I had cleaned plenty of rooms in my life. The work did not shame me. The plate they had withheld did.

Through the open door, I heard Nadine laugh.

"She needs a purpose. We can't keep carrying her forever."

I put the damp cloth down.

For twenty years, I had taught clay classes in cabin seven. We wedged clay on an old maple bench and tested glazes on small squares. Every student wrote a name beneath the glaze line. Even a bad result belonged to someone.

Now the cabin door carried a new sign: PRIVATE WELLNESS SUITE.

Inside, my wheel stood under a sheet. The shelves were empty. My test tiles had been packed into a grocery box beside a toilet brush.

I lifted one. Tess had made it at eight. Her crooked letters were still clear beneath a green stripe.

Evan found me holding it.

"We meant to tell you. Nadine has a plan for the slow season."

"Does her plan include paying the ground rent?"

He frowned. "That's handled."

"By whom?"

"She handles the transfers."

I set the tile back carefully.

Outside, a car rolled up the gravel drive. A woman stepped out with a wide tube under her arm. Nadine hurried to meet her, leaving her own supper untouched.

The woman pulled a bright drawing from the tube.

Across its top, in letters big enough to read from the doorway, were the words EXCLUSIVE RETREAT SITE.