Part One: The Pavilion
I was keeping an eye on my birthday cake when Allison arrived in my SUV.
My wife was keeping an eye on the aunts keeping an eye on the cake. That left me free to watch my sister park across enough space for a small emergency vehicle.
The reunion was at Burns Park in North Little Rock. Pavilion Six, the big one by the river trail, with the good grills and the picnic tables that only wobble if you lean on them like you mean it.
I’d organized it myself. I’d put it on my thirty-eighth birthday. That combination suggested confidence until you remembered who had to bring the ice.
About twenty-five relatives were gathered under the pavilion roof. Cousins from Conway. Aunts from Benton. Uncle Ray from Pine Bluff, who brings the same potato salad every year and defends it like a family name.
Dad had appointed himself custodian of the coffee urn. Nobody asked him to. He just stood next to it with his arms crossed, like a man guarding the last train out of a station.
My wife, Gillian, was explaining to Aunt Faye that we’d cut the cake after lunch. Not whenever somebody felt emotionally prepared for frosting.
Our son, Dwayne, had brought his notebook.
He was seven. Small for his age. Big glasses. A cowlick nobody could defeat. He’d recently discovered the pleasure of writing down things adults said and would rather forget saying.
The notebook was green. Spiral. Wide-ruled. On the cover, in marker, he’d written DWAYNE’S RECORDS.
He took it everywhere.
My name is Dean Callahan.
I’ve done stand-up comedy in and around Little Rock for fifteen years. The Loony Bin on Rodney Parham. Corporate holiday parties. Rotary luncheons. A church fundraiser in Searcy where the pastor laughed at everything except the jokes.
A quiet birthday surrounded by family sounded like a nice change. From strangers offering me career advice over chicken wings.
That was before Allison got out of the car.
I recognized the Highlander by its scrape before I saw her.
A little silver gash along the rear passenger door. From a parking garage at UAMS. I’d done it myself, three years earlier, backing out too fast because Mom was tired and wanted to get home.
The car was a 2019 Toyota Highlander. Gray. Titled to me. With more of my savings tied up in it than its current driver liked to acknowledge.
I’d lent it to Allison fourteen months earlier.
Her own car had been repossessed. A Nissan she’d financed at an interest rate I still can’t say out loud without sounding like I’m doing a bit. She needed to get to work. She works at a real estate office on Kavanaugh. Front desk.
“Just till I get back on my feet,” she said.
I said sure.
For a while, I repeated that explanation to myself every time Gillian and I needed our one remaining car at the same time.
Just till she gets back on her feet.
Our remaining car was a 2011 Honda Fit. Blue. With a hatchback and a check-engine light that had been on so long we considered it a decorative feature.
My wife is a nurse. Labor and delivery at Baptist Health. Her shifts are twelve hours, and babies don’t reschedule because your husband has a gig in Hot Springs.
So the sensible solution usually involved me staying home.
We’d shared the Fit long enough for its particular noises to become part of our marriage.
There was the noise we worried about.
And the noise we’d agreed not to discuss until payday.
By June, I’d asked Allison to return the Highlander.
“After the reunion,” she said.
And there it was. Delivering her to the reunion. As though this proved the arrangement was working beautifully.
I watched her get out.
My sister is forty-one. Three years older than me. Blond, with highlights she does herself and calls salon-quality. Sunglasses on top of her head. A sundress. She has a laugh you can hear across a parking lot, and she uses it like a turn signal.
She waved at everybody.
She didn’t wave at me.
Dad’s Buick was parked next to her. He’d brought the ice. Six bags in his trunk.
Allison walked over to help him carry it.
She had my key fob in her hand. The Highlander fob. With the little Razorbacks keychain Dwayne gave me two Christmases ago.
She needed both hands for the ice.
So she opened Dad’s passenger door and dropped the fob into his center console.
Then she took a bag of ice while Dad told her how to carry a bag of ice.
Gillian noticed the keys too.
Nurses notice where things are put. Husbands sometimes discover this only when they claim to have looked everywhere.
She looked at me across the pavilion.
I looked back.
Neither of us said anything.
I didn’t ask for the keys right away.
It was my birthday. Lunch was underway. I still believed a reasonable conversation could happen after everybody had eaten.
That belief had survived a considerable amount of evidence to the contrary.
Tony was sitting at the end of a picnic bench.
My nephew. Allison’s son. Twenty years old. Tall and skinny with a buzz cut and a Hendrix College T-shirt. His arms were folded across his chest.
He’s a junior at Hendrix. In Conway. Thirty miles up I-40. He’s studying chemistry. He wants to be a pharmacist.
He’s smart. He can work hard when he chooses. He’s also young enough to think an angry face is a complete explanation.
He didn’t look up when I walked past.
I said, “Hey, Tone.”
He didn’t answer.
I thought he was tired. Or annoyed about being at a family reunion. Or just twenty.
I didn’t push.
I wanted the afternoon to go well.
There’s no dignified way to admit this. But I can make a roomful of paying strangers laugh for forty-five minutes. And I can still spend lunch hoping my father thinks I did a decent job with the pavilion.
Dad’s name is Walter Callahan.
He was a conductor for Union Pacific for thirty years. Little Rock to Texarkana. Little Rock to Memphis. He’s sixty-eight now. Retired. He has a conductor’s voice. It carries. And a conductor’s way of thinking. Everybody on board, everybody seated, everybody going the same direction.
He’s comfortable directing movement.
He’s less comfortable being asked to reconsider where everybody’s going.
Since Mom died, Sunday dinners at his house in Sherwood have become how our family stays a family.
Allison comes. Tony comes when he’s home from school. Gillian and Dwayne and I come.
Dad makes pot roast. It’s not as good as Mom’s. Nobody says so.
I keep going partly for Dwayne.
And partly because I don’t know what else to do with missing her.
My mother’s name was Linda Callahan.
She died two years ago in March. Colon cancer. She was sixty-four.
I miss her in practical places.
A parking lot can do it. Especially if I find an old receipt while I’m digging for change.
When she was being treated, I drove her to UAMS forty-one times.
The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. On West Markham. The Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute. Chemo on the fourth floor.
Forty-one times.
I know the number because I kept the parking stubs. Not because I was planning a presentation. Because I couldn’t throw them away. They’re in a rubber band in the glove box of the Highlander.
Or they were. When I had the Highlander.
Allison went once.
She went with me one Tuesday in October. She held Mom’s hand in the infusion chair. She took a picture.
She posted it on Facebook.
Sitting with my mama through chemo today. She’s the strongest woman I know. Family is everything.
Four hundred likes.
I didn’t begrudge her the visit.
I minded what happened afterward. When that photograph seemed to become the whole record of who’d been there.
At the funeral, people came up to Allison. You were so good to her. I saw your post. Driving her to all those appointments.
Allison said thank you.
She didn’t correct them.
Mom knew who drove.
Gillian has reminded me of that more than once. Usually when I start explaining myself to people who haven’t asked a question.
Your mother knew, Dean. That’s the record that counts.
Under the pavilion, I could hear Dad laughing at something by the urn.
For a moment, it sounded like any other family gathering.
I let myself enjoy it.
The gift table stood near the grill.
A folding table with a plastic tablecloth printed with balloons. Wrapped boxes. A few envelopes. A gift bag with tissue paper from Aunt Faye that was almost certainly socks.
And Dwayne’s card.
He’d made it himself. On a piece of yellow construction paper folded in half.
On the front, in crayon, a drawing of me. Holding a microphone. Under a head large enough to need its own stool.
Inside, in his careful seven-year-old printing:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD. YOU ARE THE FUNNYEST MAN IN ARKANSAS. EVEN WHEN NOBODY LAFFS. LOVE DWAYNE.
He’d worked on it for three days.
I hadn’t corrected the proportions.
