The Twelve Chairs I Carried Home
People have asked me why I ever let it out of the house. It was doing no good where it was. My daughter had an empty room and a new start, and Thanksgiving was going to be at her house anyway, with me at the stove. I thought I was lending it to the same family that had always sat around it.
It never crossed my mind that I could be counted out of my own chairs.
I didn’t sleep much Sunday night. I finished the bread, because you don’t waste two loaves, and then I sat at the counter and felt sorry for myself in a thorough way.
Around eleven I thought of Harold.
Harold sits two pews ahead of me at the Methodist church. He buried his wife in March, after fifty-one years, and that very morning in the fellowship hall I had asked him what he was doing for Thanksgiving. He’d said his boy was in Seattle and couldn’t get away, and he would probably just go out to the cafe on the highway. “They do a nice turkey plate,” he said. “Comes with pie.”
And I had said, “Well, that’ll be nice,” and gone to find my coat. Because I had a dinner for twelve to think about.
I sat there at eleven o’clock at night ashamed of myself. Not on account of Stephanie. On account of Harold, and that turkey plate, and the fact that it had taken being left out to make me notice somebody else who was.
Monday morning at eight I called him.
“Harold, it’s Roberta. I’m having Thanksgiving dinner Thursday and I want you at it. One o’clock.”
There was a pause. “I thought you were at your daughter’s.”
“I was. Now I’m having it here.”
“Roberta, I don’t want to be anybody’s charity.”
“Harold, I have a twenty-two pound turkey and nobody to eat it. You’d be mine.”
He laughed, the first I had heard out of him since March. “Can I bring something?”
“Bring yourself. Wear a tie if you feel like it.”
I hung up feeling better. Then I walked into my dining room to see about a tablecloth.
A braided rug with four dents in it. A china hutch. Nothing else.
I stood there a good while.
My daughter has asked me, and I have asked myself, whether I went and got that table to hurt her. I was hurt, and I’d be lying to say otherwise. But I went because I had asked a grieving man to dinner, and I owned a table, and it was across town holding up somebody else’s Thanksgiving that I wasn’t welcome at.
A person is allowed to need her own things.
I put on my quilted vest and walked next door.
Wayne and Donna have lived beside me for twenty-six years. Wayne is retired from the county roads department and still runs about thirty cows out toward Ayr, which means he owns a sixteen-foot bumper-pull stock trailer.
Donna had me at her kitchen table with coffee before I’d finished the first sentence. I told it plain, and I did not run Stephanie down, because she is my daughter.
Wayne listened with his arms folded.
“So you need the table hauled,” he said.
“The table, both leaves, and twelve chairs. And a turkey.”
“I power-washed the trailer after I took calves to the sale barn in October. It’s clean as it’s going to get. I’ll lay a tarp down.” He thought. “How do the legs come off?”
“Bolts, up in the corners. Don always used a socket.”
“Nine-sixteenths, probably. I’ll bring the set.” He looked at me over his cup. “You sure about this, Roberta? Once it’s on the trailer it’s on the trailer.”