The Key I Handed Back Quietly

The VFW Hall

I wore my navy dress, the one with the small pearl buttons, and I put the name card in my purse.

The Kinsley VFW hall holds about a hundred and forty people with the folding tables set the long way, and that Friday it was full. Paper streamers hung along the walls, and the air smelled of ham, brown sugar, and coffee left too long on the burner. I knew almost everyone there.

Lori’s table was the long one at the front, nearest the little stage. Her father, Vern Mercer, sat on the end in a sport coat that was too tight across his shoulders, a lean, weathered farmer with a jaw like a barn door. Her mother Vicki sat beside him in a lavender blouse, with her purse in her lap, looking pleased and anxious in equal parts. Keith was there in the gray suit he wore to his father’s funeral, and he looked as if the collar was strangling him. And between his parents, in a clip-on tie and a shirt buttoned all the way to the top, sat Russ, with a plate he had not touched.

The chair on his right was empty.

I stood in the doorway holding my purse and thinking. I could walk up there and take the chair, and let the whole front of the hall see what had been done to me without saying a word. But I had said I would give them room, and I found I meant to keep my word all the way to the end, especially if it made no one’s life easier.

Lori saw me. I watched her do it, across a hundred and forty heads, her smile staying exactly where it was. Only the eyes moved. She looked at the empty chair, and she looked back at me, and for one moment I saw a woman do arithmetic.

I took a seat at the back table, next to Tammy, who had come with her husband. She squeezed my hand under the cloth and did not say a word, and I loved her for it.

Russ saw me too. The second I sat down his whole face changed. He lifted one hand in a tiny wave, down by his lap where his mother would not see, and I waved back the same way. Then he looked at the empty chair beside him, and I shook my head very slightly, and I saw his shoulders drop.

That was harder than the porch.