The Chair I Kept Empty For My Son
And I said, “Then maybe you’re not his son after all.”
I will not dress that sentence up. It was cruel, and it was aimed, and I knew exactly where it would land before it left my mouth. Danny went white. He did not shout back. He has his father’s way of going quiet when something cuts deep instead of loud, and the quiet that night was worse than any yelling could have been. He stood up from this table, walked out the back porch door into the dark, and by the end of that week he had sold his truck tools to a neighbor for gas money and was gone to Rochester with a duffel bag and a number I did not have.
Eleven years ago next month.
**
People in town ask, sometimes, carefully, the way you ask about a thing you already suspect you should not ask about, why I never just called him. I did call him. Three times, that first year, on a number his cousin gave me. He never once picked up. I wrote him twice, real letters, the kind you put a stamp on, and neither one came back marked undeliverable, which told me he was getting them and choosing not to answer, which hurt worse than if the post office had sent them home. After that second letter I stopped. Some of that was grief wearing me down past the point of fighting for anything more. And if I am honest, more of it was the same pride I had thrown at him across this table, just wearing a quieter coat. I had told my son he was not his father’s son. A woman does not get to say a thing like that and then also get to be the one who keeps knocking. I believed, in the stubborn Odegaard way Gene always teased me for, that the door had to open from his side or it would not mean anything at all.
So instead of calling, I did the only thing I knew how to do, which was the thing my own mother did for my father’s empty chair the two winters he worked the pipeline up in Alaska, and the thing her mother did before her. I kept the table set the way it was supposed to be. Every Sunday for eleven years I have put out two plates after church, mine and his, in his same chair at the end nearest the window where he used to watch for his father’s truck coming up the lane. I say grace over both plates. I clear his after, same as it came, and I do not think about how many thousand suppers that food never got eaten because thinking about it too hard is a door I learned a long time ago not to open on a Sunday with dishes still to wash.