“Glenn,” I said, and I took the microphone from his hand before he could stop me, “I will tell you what this is.” Two hundred people in that tent held their breath. “In June, I sold Pike Ready Mix to a national building materials company. Both plants, twenty six trucks, seventy one drivers who all kept their jobs. Eighteen million three hundred thousand dollars.” The only sound was the generator. “I did not tell anybody. Not even my sister.”
A woman near the front gasped. A man in a cowboy hat took off the hat. Glenn Schaefer, a round, pink faced man who sells insurance, stared at me with his mouth working, and I watched the gears turn behind his eyes. “Cement Rhonda,” he said, and he heard himself, and stopped. “Rhonda.” I said, “That is right, Glenn. For thirty years you have called me Cement. Tonight I would like to explain what I poured.” I nodded to the field behind the tent. “Line eighteen of the fleet schedule is a red Kenworth in white house paint behind the barn of your son. The buyer paid for that truck. Your son is selling it for ninety five thousand dollars.”
Cody went gray. He stood next to his father with his hands dangling, a tall, bony young man of thirty five in a clean shirt, and he looked as if somebody had pulled a plug in the bottom of his shoes. “Aunt Rhonda,” he said, “I can explain.” I said, “I would love to hear it.” The whole tent leaned in. “I thought the company was dying,” he said. “You told me the big outfits were undercutting. I figured you would lose it all, and the trucks would go to the bank anyway, and I thought, if I could get one truck, a loader, just enough to start.” He swallowed. “Dad said I should go for it. He said it was an opportunity.”
A truck drum painted over in white house paint brought a roomful of birthday guests to silence and gave one ready mix founder the night to bring her nephew back to the plant.
The silence that followed was the kind you can hear in your teeth. Glenn Schaefer went crimson, then white. My sister Debbie, who had been standing at the back near the cake with her hands over her mouth, began to walk slowly forward through the crowd, which parted for her without a sound. She stepped up on the little stage in her good blue dress. She looked at her husband. “Glenn,” she said quietly, “did you tell Cody to take the truck?” He opened his mouth. She said, “Because he just said you did.” I have known my sister for sixty years, and I have heard her angry, but I had never heard her sound like that. Calm. Cold. Like a lake in January.
“Deb,” Glenn said, “it was not like that.” She said, “What was it like?” He said, “I was only trying to help the boy.” She said, “By stealing from my sister.” The word hung over the tent. Somebody in the back set a glass down on a tray. Cody, standing between his parents, put his face in his hands and began to cry in great silent heaves. “Mom,” he said. “Aunt Rhonda gave me everything. She taught me to drive a mixer. She taught me to pour a slab. She trusted me with a truck at twenty seven.” He raised his face. “And I took her truck in the dark, like a thief.”
I put the microphone down on the speaker. My hands were shaking, and I was very tired. I looked out at the faces in that tent, the neighbors and the cousins and the fellows from the lodge, people who had known me all my life as a woman with a mixer truck and concrete under her fingernails. “Everybody,” I said, in my ordinary voice, “please. Eat your brisket. Dance. It is the sixtieth birthday of Glenn. Nobody died. Nobody is going to jail tonight. The band will play again as soon as somebody finds the drummer.”
They laughed. It was a thin laugh, with relief in it. The drummer, who had been hiding under the stage, crawled out, and the band struck up, and slowly, one by one, people drifted back to the tables. I stepped down into the grass. Debbie came with me, and we walked out together into the dark of the field, toward the barn, arm in arm, as we had when we were girls on the farm outside Garber. We did not talk. At the edge of the barn lot, in the beam of a pickup headlight, stood the red Kenworth with FOR SALE dripping down the drum.
Debbie touched the cab. “Rhonda, I am so sorry.” I said, “You did nothing, Deb.” She said, “I married him. I let him call you Cement for thirty years, and I laughed along, because it was easier.” Her eyes shone in the dark. “I am going to make this right.” And she did. She made Glenn sit down with me and my lawyer the following Tuesday in the office of the insurance agency. The truck, the loader, and the small mixer were back at the north plant by Thursday. Cody wrote a letter of apology to the new owners, in his own hand, and drove it to Oklahoma City himself, in a clean pickup.
The buyer, as it happened, had a place for him. Not as an owner, as he had hoped, but as a driver, at a union wage, on the Enid route. He accepted at once. He is a good driver, and he shows up before dawn, and he washes the drum every night with the pride I once saw in myself. Last month, he asked me to lunch and told me, shyly, that he had begun saving to start a small business of his own, honestly, a few years from now. “Aunt Rhonda,” he said, “will you teach me how to pour a bid?” I said, “Bring a pencil, and a very thick skin.”
Glenn took longer. He avoided my eyes for months, at church, at the grocery, at the county fair. Then one Sunday in the fall, as I was leaving the parking lot of the Methodist church, he walked up to my truck and stood at the window, his hat in his hands. He is a big man, and he looked small. “Rhonda,” he said, “I called you Cement because I was jealous. I always was.” I looked at him through the glass for a long moment. Then I rolled the window down. “Glenn,” I said, “I know. Get in. Debbie has a roast in the oven.”