The Twelve Chairs I Carried Home
He pushed his sleeves up. “Where do you want the plates?”
We stacked her dishes on the kitchen counter, carefully, every plate and glass. I folded her cream tablecloth in thirds and laid the name cards on top of it in order, so she would not have to work out the seating again. I wasn’t there to wreck her dinner. I was there for wood.
Wayne got down on his back under the table with a trouble light and a ratchet.
“Nine-sixteenths,” he said from underneath. “Told you.”
Dylan and I started on the chairs.
We carried them out two at a time and set them in the driveway, and I showed him how to wrap each one, comforter over the back and tucked under the seat so the top rails wouldn’t rub. He had done four when he tipped the fifth one over to get at the legs, and stopped.
“Grandma. There’s writing on this.”
I knew what it was before I looked. I had not thought about it in years.
Under the seat, in carpenter’s pencil, in printing as square as a fence: Steph’s. Reglued 11-89. She leans back.
“That’s your grandpa,” I said. “Every chair he ever fixed, he wrote down who broke it and when. He said a chair ought to know.”
Dylan turned over the one beside it. Jim dropped it, Easter 94. That was Pat’s Jim. He turned over the next. Roberta stood on it to hang curtains. Knows better. 2001.
“That is a lie,” I said. “I did not know better.”
He almost smiled. Then he turned over the eighth chair, the one with a little chip out of the front rung, and he went still.
Dylan. Reglued 2019. So does he.
He was eight that year. Don had three more years in him, and nobody knew it.
Dylan crouched there in his mother’s driveway with his hand flat on the bottom of that chair seat. He was eleven when his grandfather died. He doesn’t talk about it.
“He wrote me down,” he said.
“He wrote all of us down.”
“I didn’t know he did that.”
“Neither did your mother. She never once turned one over.” I had to stop and look at the sky a second. “He’d be proud of how tall you got.”
He wiped his face on his sleeve, quick, the way boys do, and wrapped that chair himself. He did it slower than the others, and tucked the comforter in twice.
I had the eleventh chair in my hands and Dylan was coming behind me with a table leaf when Stephanie’s car turned into the driveway.
She had to stop at the curb, because of the trailer. She got out still in her work smock with her purse hanging off her elbow, and she looked at the trailer, the quilts, the chairs stacked seat to seat, and the front door standing open on her empty dining room.
“Mom.” Her voice was thin. “What are you doing?”
I set the chair down on the concrete. I did not raise my voice then and I haven’t since.
“I told you this morning. I’ll be needing my things for Thursday.”
“You said the turkey!”
“I said my things. You had a waiting room full of people, and I don’t blame you for not hearing.”
“You can’t just…” She came up the drive. “I have twelve people coming in two days. Arlene is coming. Where am I supposed to put twelve people?”
I had thought about what I would say to that, and I had promised the Lord and myself it would not be smart.