The Name On Every Truck

I am not going to tell you I did not know. I knew. A woman knows. But knowing a thing and saying a thing out loud are two different countries, and I lived in the first one for about a year because I was afraid of what was across the border in the second one. I was afraid of being forty-eight and alone. I was afraid of the town talking. I was afraid, mostly, of a thing I could not have named back then, which is that I had made myself so small for so long that I was not sure there was enough of me left to stand on.

So. The dinner.

The company dinner is the biggest night of our year. Every driver comes, and every driver brings his wife, and the mechanics come, and the co-op people come, and the farmers we have hauled for come, and the old retired drivers come, the ones with the oxygen tanks and the stories, and the widows of the dead drivers come, because my father always sent a car for them and I kept that up. It is two hundred people in the Legion hall, and it is the one night a year that the whole world of Hollis Freight and Feed is in a single room. My father used to stand up at the end and say a few words. Just a few. He would thank the drivers by name and he would say something true about each one, and grown men who had hauled through blizzards would get something in their eye.

I had set it all up the same as always. I had even made the little table cards. And when I came back from checking on the coffee, which was fine, the coffee was fine, there had never been anything wrong with the coffee, I saw that Dale had moved the seating.

He had put Kayla at the head table. At the head table, where my father used to sit, where the family sat. He had put her in the chair next to his, which was my chair, which had been my mother’s chair, and I was not at the head table at all. My card was gone. He had put me at table nine, by the kitchen door, next to Dale’s cousin Sheryl who talks the whole time about her gallbladder.

I stood there at the back of the room holding the full coffee pot I had made for no reason, and I looked at that head table, and I want to tell you I felt rage but what I felt was more like going through ice. A cold quiet. I set the pot down on the warmer and I went and I sat at table nine by the kitchen door, because there were two hundred people watching and I was not going to make a scene, I had never in my life made a scene, making myself small was the only skill I had ever really practiced.