Nobody spoke. A breeze moved through the cottonwoods.
Ada reached out from her lawn chair and put a hand on his arm.
“That’s enough, son,” she said softly. “You said it.”
I looked across the circle at Ben, who was watching his uncle with an expression I couldn’t read. Then, slowly, my son stood. He crossed the grass, and he held out his hand, and Dwayne looked at it for a long moment as if it were something precious.
He took it.
They shook once, firmly, the way men do. Then Ben pulled his uncle to his feet and, to everyone’s astonishment, including his own, wrapped both arms around him and held on.
Dwayne stood rigid for a second. Then he put his big, scarred hands against my son’s back, and bowed his head, and held on, too.
I sat with my sandwich going warm in my lap, and I didn’t look at anybody. I looked at the field, at the long green rows going out to the horizon, the swaths of cut hay curing in the sun, and the line of the old windbreak where the cottonwoods used to stand.
