The Twelve Chairs I Carried Home
I should tell you about the table, since it is the reason for everything else.
My husband Don and I bought it in March of 1981 at a farm sale south of Juniata. We had been married two years and were eating off a card table his mother had loaned us, which I mention because I’ll come back to card tables. The auctioneer started it at two hundred and got nothing. It was a long oak extension table that somebody, sometime in the fifties, had painted kitchen green, legs and all, and it had eight pressed-back chairs with it, painted to match, two of them with the seats split.
It got down to fifty before anybody raised a hand. Don went to eighty-five and the other fellow shook his head. We had a hundred and ten dollars in the checking account that morning. I remember because I did the subtraction in my head all the way home, with the table upside down in the back of his father’s pickup and the chairs tied on top of it with baler twine.
He stripped that green paint in the garage all spring, with the door up, after his route. Don drove a propane truck for the co-op for thirty-one years, and he smelled faintly of it every day of his life, and I never minded. Under the paint was quarter-sawn oak with a grain like tiger stripes. I stood in the garage door the night he got the top clean and neither of us said anything for a while.
With both leaves in, that table runs just shy of ten feet. It seats twelve if nobody minds an elbow. For twenty years we only had the eight chairs, and then ten, and I hunted the rest at sales and secondhand stores, matching the pattern pressed into the top rail. I found the twelfth in a consignment shop in Minden in 2003 for twelve dollars. Don said it was the only time he ever saw me cry over furniture.
Every Thanksgiving of Stephanie’s life was eaten at that table. The dinner after her first wedding, and the long quiet Sunday dinners after that marriage came apart, when it was just her and me and Don and a six-year-old boy who wouldn’t eat his peas.
Don died four years ago this past April. His heart, in his sleep, which the doctor said was a mercy and I suppose it was.
After that it was a ten-foot table with one woman at it. I’ll be honest. I quit sitting there. I ate my supper at the kitchen counter with the television on, and the table turned into a place to sort the mail.
Then last June Stephanie married Curt Lindquist, who sells seed for a company out of Grand Island and is, I will say right now, a decent man. They bought one of the newer houses up on the north end of Hastings, the first house she had ever owned after nine years in a rented duplex. It had a dining room with a chandelier in it and not one stick of furniture.
She stood in that empty room the day they got the keys and I could see her trying to work out what a table would cost.
So I said it. “Take mine. Take it till you find one of your own. It’s a loan.”
I said the word loan. She agrees now that I did.