The Twelve Chairs I Carried Home
“I don’t know, honey. I’m sorry for the trouble. But I’ve got people coming too, and it’s my table, and I can’t seat them on a rug.”
“Who do you have coming?”
“Harold from church, to start. He was going to eat at the cafe by himself.”
That stopped her. She knows Harold. His wife taught her Sunday school.
“You’re doing this to punish me,” she said, quieter.
“No. If I wanted to punish you I’d have had it out with you Sunday night, and then come Thursday and sat in the corner with my lips pressed together. You’ve seen me do it.” She had. “I’m not going to do that. I’m going to go home and have a nice dinner. That’s all this is.”
Wayne came through the door with Dylan on the other end of the tabletop, carrying it on edge, and both of them found something on the ground to look at.
Stephanie watched ten feet of her father’s work go past her into a stock trailer.
“Curt’s going to ask where it went,” she said.
“Then I expect you’ll tell him.” I picked my chair back up. “Where is Curt?”
“McCook. Customer meetings. He’s back tomorrow night.”
“Does he know I’m not coming Thursday?”
She did not answer right off. “I told him you had other plans.”
Well. By then I did.
Dylan had come back for the second leaf. He stood there holding it in both arms like a boy carrying a door.
“Mom,” he said. “It’s her table.”
“Go inside, Dylan.”
He didn’t. He walked the leaf out to the trailer and slid it in flat on the tarp, and then he came back and stood beside me. He didn’t say another word. He didn’t have to.
I got the turkey out of the garage refrigerator myself and Wayne set it in his cooler. That made all of it: the table, two leaves, twelve chairs and one bird. I took only what was mine, and not a fork besides. Then I went back up the driveway, because there was one more thing, and it was the one that counted.
“Stephanie. Dinner’s at one o’clock Thursday at my house. The door is open. To you, to Curt, to his mother, to every one of them. I mean that with my whole heart. I have never in my life shut a door on you, and I’m not starting at sixty-six.”
She was crying by then, the mad kind. “I can’t just cancel on eleven people, Mom.”
“I know you can’t. I’m not asking you to. I’m telling you where I’ll be.”
I got in the pickup. In the side mirror I could see her standing in her driveway in that smock, and my grandson beside her, not touching her but not leaving either.
Wayne didn’t say anything until we were clear back on Burlington.
“That boy,” he said, “is going to be all right.”
Wayne and Jim put the table back together in my dining room that night, legs in the same four dents in the rug.
Then I sat down in one of the twelve chairs, by myself, and had my doubts.
I’ll tell you what I prayed, since I’ve told you everything else. I asked the Lord to show me if I’d done a spiteful thing. He was quiet about it, which in my experience can go either way.
Wednesday the phone rang at six in the evening and it was Dylan.
“Grandma, Mom said I can come to yours tomorrow if I want. She said it like I shouldn’t want to.”