The Dock
Halfway through the Meeks family reunion, my mother-in-law pushed my sixty-eight-year-old father off the dock.
She said later it was a joke. She said it about a hundred times.
I was standing three feet away when it happened. I saw her hands go flat against his back. I saw her lean into it. I saw Dad’s arms go out, the way a man’s arms go out when the ground isn’t where he left it.
Then he was in the water.
Dad came up sputtering, waist-deep in the brown water beside the dock.
Uncle Wade’s farm pond is maybe an acre and a half, out past Buffalo, Missouri, in a dip between two hayfields. Cattle drink from it. It’s the color of chocolate milk in July, with a slick of green along the edges and a bottom of soft mud that swallows your feet to the ankle.
His light blue button-up shirt was wet up to the chest. The one he wore to church. He’d worn it because it was a family thing and he wanted to look nice. The water came up past his belt buckle.
He stood there blinking, with pond water running out of his gray hair and down his face.
His hand went to his left ear.
Then his right.
Nothing there.
Forty people at the reunion went quiet at once.
All the Meeks cousins and aunts and uncles and kids, spread out across Uncle Wade’s yard on lawn chairs and blankets and the tailgates of pickups. A few seconds earlier there’d been music playing on somebody’s Bluetooth speaker and kids shrieking on the slip-and-slide and the smell of brisket smoking on the hill.
Now there was nothing. Just the speaker playing Alan Jackson to nobody, and the cicadas, and my father standing in the pond with both hands pressed to his empty ears.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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