The Twelve Chairs I Carried Home

She set down her fork and said, “It’s my mother’s. She came and got it Tuesday. She needed it.”

“Is your mother having people?”

“Yes.”

“Well, why on earth isn’t your mother here?”

Curt told me you could have heard a pea roll.

“Because I told her not to come,” my daughter said, in front of her new husband and his whole family. “I told her you needed the big table, and there wasn’t room for her at it.”

Mrs. Lindquist put her napkin down.

“I needed,” she said. “Stephanie, when did I ever say such a thing?”

“In October. You stood in the dining room and said you missed having a big table.”

“I said I missed it. I did not say I needed yours.”

It came out then, all of it. Mrs. Lindquist had done Thanksgiving for forty-three years in a farmhouse outside Holdrege. Her husband died two winters ago, and last summer she sold the place because she could not keep it up, and moved to an apartment here in Hastings to be near Curt. The household goods went at auction on a Saturday in July. She stood in her own yard and watched a man from Kearney load her dining table for a hundred and forty dollars.

“I cried from Holdrege to Hastings,” she told me in my front room, still in her coat. “Better than fifty miles. Do you think a woman who had just done that would put another woman out of hers?”

What my daughter had done, she had done out of plain fright. She’d had one marriage fail. She had a new mother-in-law who had run a famous Thanksgiving for four decades and who shook hands like a county commissioner. She heard one wistful sentence in October and built a demand out of it. Then she worked out that there were twelve chairs and thirteen people, and that the thirteenth was the one who always took over the kitchen.

“Because you do, Mom,” Stephanie said. She was sitting on my davenport twisting a tissue. “You come in and you take the spoon out of my hand. You’ve done it my whole life. I wanted her to see I could do one thing by myself.”

That was fair. It stung, and it was fair. I run a kitchen like a sergeant. Don used to say so, and I never once listened.

“You could have told me that,” I said. “You could have said, Mom, sit down and let me burn it. I’d have sat. I’d have hated it, but I’d have sat.”

“I know.”

“What you did instead was count me.”

“I know.” She could hardly get it out. “I stood in that room today with those card tables, and everybody being so nice about it, and I thought, this is what I asked my mother to make room for. I asked her to give up her own chair at her own table so I could look like I had one.”

Curt had not said much. He is not a talker. But he spoke up then, and I thought the better of him for it.

“I asked her whose table it was,” he said. “Right there at dinner. I’d figured it came from her first house. She’d told me you had other plans, Roberta, and I took that the way it was said, and I should have picked up the phone and asked you myself. That one’s on me.” He turned his cap around in his hands. “When she told it, I said get your coat. And Mom said get the pies.”