The Kids Table They Sat Me At

Lily sat down next to me at that card table and looked at the paper plate with the turkey printed on it and looked through the sliding door into the dining room where the grownups were sitting under the good light, and then she looked at me.

“Grandma,” she said, “why are you out here with us?”

“Because this is where the fun is,” I said, and I smiled, because that is what you do.

She did not smile back. She looked at me the way she looks at a person who is not telling the truth.

“You made Thanksgiving,” she said. “At the farm. You always made it.”

“Things change, sweetheart,” I said. “Eat your rolls.”

Through the sliding door I could hear them starting without us. I heard Richard’s laugh, big and loud, and I heard Brooke say something about a charcuterie board, and I heard the scrape of the carving knife on the good platter, the one that had been my mother in law’s, that had somehow migrated from my house to Brooke’s along with Thanksgiving itself. I heard my son laugh at something his father in law said.

Nobody called us in for grace. There was no grace.

The space heater ticked and gave up. Caleb put his coat back on over his nice shirt. The toddler threw a roll on the floor and the four year old ate it. And I sat there in my good blue dress and I thought about Tom, and I thought, well, Thomas, this is what it comes to, you work and you give and you host for forty years and in the end they put you in the cold room with the paper plates, and I was glad, I was truly glad, that he was not alive to see his wife sat out with the dog crate.

That is when Caleb stood up.

He did not announce it. He was seven. He just picked up his paper plate, with his turkey and his one scoop of potatoes, and he walked around the card table and he came and stood next to my chair.

“Can I sit by you, Grandma,” he said.

“You are sitting by me,” I said. “We’re all right here together.”

“No,” he said, with that serious cowlick seriousness. “By you.”

So I pulled the extra folding chair close, and he climbed into it, right at my elbow, and he leaned against my arm and ate his potatoes, and I put my hand on his back the way you do.

And then Hannah moved.