The Head Table Moved to the Kitchen

I did not answer that. I wrote the date.

I wrote his business name on the line. I wrote eleven thousand four hundred and no hundredths, and I will not pretend my hand was steady, because I had never in my life written a check that size, not even for the truck.

“One more thing,” I said. “Not a word. Not to Wade, not to Emily, not to her folks. If anybody asks, it’s been taken care of, and that’s all.”

“That’s not right.”

“It’s what I want.”

He took a long breath through his nose. Then he nodded.

On the memo line I wrote: Wade and Emily, supper.

I was signing my name when the door swung open behind me.

“Mom?”

It was Wade.

I turned around on the stool. He was standing in the doorway in his gray suit with his tie pulled loose, and he was not looking at me. He was looking at the steel table. At the open folder, and the bill in it, and my checkbook lying across the bill with the ink still wet.

He looked at it for what felt like a full minute.

He is his father’s son. Ron could look at an engine for sixty seconds without touching it and then tell you what was wrong. I watched my boy read that table the same way.

“Dale,” he said, very quietly. “Is that what I think it is?”

Dale looked at me. I shook my head.

“I couldn’t tell you,” Dale said, and closed the folder. So he kept his word. It did not matter in the least.

Wade came across the linoleum and stood in front of me. His eyes were wet. I had not seen that since the funeral.

“That’s the roof,” he said.

“It’s supper.”

“Mom, that is your roof. I carried the buckets up there myself.”

“Then you know I have buckets.”

He picked up the place card and turned it over in his fingers.

“I looked at my plate,” he said. “She said that to you, in front of everybody, and I looked at my plate.”

“You did.”

“Dad would have been on his feet before she finished the sentence.”

“Your dad had twenty-five years of practice at being my husband. You’d had four hours.” I took the card back from him and stood it up again. “You didn’t know which way to jump. I understood it. I didn’t care for it, but I understood it.”

“I know which way now.”

“Wade. Don’t you go out there and make a scene. I walked back here so there wouldn’t be one.”

He bent down and kissed the top of my head, right on the part, the way I used to do to him.

“I’m not going to make a scene,” he said. “I’m going to eat supper with my mother.”

And he walked out.

---

I watched it through the pass-through window, and so did Tammy, and so did Cody, with a wet pan dripping in his hands.

Wade went down the length of the hall at an ordinary walk. He went around the end of the head table to his own place. He said something to Emily, bending close, with his hand on the back of her chair. It took a little while. I saw her face go from smiling to still.

I saw her look at her mother.