The Chair I Saved For My Son

Sixty Candles

I did not want a party for my sixtieth. Our pastor offered to open up the fellowship hall, the same one Brent walked out of at his grandmother’s funeral, and half the Wednesday night ladies offered to bring casseroles, and I turned every single one of them down as kindly as I knew how.

All I wanted was my children. Abigail and Blake, both of whom lived close enough to make it an easy drive, both of whom had said yes weeks ago with real enthusiasm, the kind that made me let myself hope a little. And Brent. I mailed his invitation to the same address Abigail had for him in Oklahoma, a plain card with my own handwriting on it because I did not trust myself to say the words on the phone without my voice breaking. I did not expect an answer. I sent it anyway, the way you throw a coin in a well you no longer believe grants wishes, because some part of you cannot quite stop trying.

No answer came. I told myself that was fine. I told myself two out of three, at sixty, in this life, was still a table worth setting.

I spent that last week the way I spend every week before a holiday. I drove out to the feed store for a bag of chicken feed and, while I was there, bought a new tablecloth clip so the wind off the highway wouldn’t take my mother’s yellow cloth the way it took a paper plate off the church picnic table every single Fourth of July without fail. I picked up a card from the drugstore rack for myself, the kind you give a friend, because nobody else was going to think to get me one, and I did not want to walk into sixty without at least a store bought sentiment sitting on my own kitchen counter. I called the Wednesday night prayer chain to let them know I was doing fine, better than fine, and to please not fuss, and half of them fussed anyway, which is what a small town does when it loves you whether you ask it to or not.

So I set it for four. Me, Abigail, Blake, and one empty chair I could not bring myself to take away, because some habits outlive the hope that built them.

I ironed my mother’s yellow tablecloth that morning, the one she used to bring out for Easter, and I hung it over the same table where Brent once did his ninth grade algebra homework and where, seventeen years before that, he learned to hold a fork. I made fried chicken, because it was the dish all three of my children used to fight over the last drumstick from, back when fighting over food was the biggest conflict this house ever had to survive. I made funeral potatoes, because in Colter Mill you make funeral potatoes for funerals and for birthdays and for the Fourth of July, and nobody has ever once complained about the overlap. I baked a caramel cake from my own mother’s recipe, the one with the burnt sugar frosting that never sets quite right and tastes better for it, and I stuck sixty candles’ worth of light into it using what I had, since the gas station on the highway only carried packs of forty two.

I put on my good blue blouse. I lit the candles a little before six. And then I sat down at the head of my own table, in the house I had paid for alone for two decades, and I waited for my children to come home.