The Kids Table They Sat Me At

The sunroom was off the back of the house, past the laundry, through a sliding door that never sealed right. It was where they kept the dog crate and the folded lawn chairs and the boxes they had not unpacked since they moved in. It had a space heater that worked when it felt like it, and that day it did not feel like it. There was a card table set up out there, the kind with the wobbly leg, and five folding chairs, and paper plates with turkeys printed on them, and a jug of the cheap orange drink the children liked.

“The dining room is full,” Brooke said again, in case anyone in the kitchen had not heard. “You understand.”

Her mother Carol, passing with a bowl of olives, gave me a little tip of her head, the kind you give a woman who is holding the door for you. Her father Richard was already sitting in Tom’s chair, in Tom’s spot, swirling a glass of wine, telling my son something about his golf swing.

My son Daniel did not look up.

That is the detail I cannot get past. Danny was standing right there at the counter, close enough to touch, cutting the ends off the green beans his wife had bought already cut, and when his mother was sent out to the cold room with the paper plates, he kept his eyes on the cutting board.

I am sixty-four years old. My name is Margaret Ellison, though everyone from the Co-op to the church nursery has called me Maggie since I was a girl. I buried my husband Thomas twenty-two months ago, on a gray Tuesday in January, in the cemetery behind Bethel Methodist out on the county road where three generations of his people are buried. And I will tell you what I did when my daughter in law sat me at the children’s table in the cold sunroom at the Thanksgiving I used to host.

I went and sat down at the children’s table.

I did not argue. I want that on the record, because in the weeks after, a lot of people had a lot of ideas about what I should have said, and most of those ideas involved me making a scene in a house full of people who had already decided where I belonged. I have lived long enough to know that a woman my age who raises her voice at a holiday table does not become the wronged party. She becomes the crazy mother in law. She becomes the story Brooke tells her friends at the gym, the one where she is so patient and I am so difficult.

So I carried my scalloped corn into the kitchen. I set it on the counter next to the store cookies. I took off my good coat and hung it on the hook by the back door, under the dog leash. And I walked out to the cold sunroom and sat down in a folding chair at a card table with a wobbly leg, in my good blue dress, with my hands folded in my lap the way my own mother taught me, and I waited for someone to say grace.