The Chair I Kept Empty For My Son

Pastor Hale came by most Tuesdays those first few years, not to counsel me exactly, just to sit at this table and drink coffee and let me talk or not talk, whichever the day called for. He never once told me to pick up the phone and make the call myself, which I have thanked him for since, because the few people who did tell me that only made the pride in me dig in harder. A neighbor woman, Lois Haugen from next door, used to bring over a casserole on the anniversary of the week Danny left, every year without fail, and never once asked me why I still set the extra plate. She just set her casserole dish down and said she figured I knew my own business better than she did. That is the kind of town this is. It does not always know what to do with a woman’s grief, but it generally knows enough to leave her dignity alone while she carries it.

And I kept a drawer.

It started small. The first Christmas after he left I bought him a pocketknife, the same brand his father always carried, because it was the kind of thing you buy a son you expect to see again by spring. He did not come by spring. I put it in the bottom drawer of the hutch in the front room, under the good tablecloth we never use, and the next year I put something else in beside it, and the year after that something else, until by this past Christmas there were eleven years of a mother buying Christmas and birthday presents for a boy who was not there to open them. A good leather wallet. A Twins cap the year they finally made the playoffs. A framed photograph of his father in the barn that I had copied special at the shop in town. A stack of birthday cards, eleven of them, each one written out in full and never once mailed, because I did not have an address to send them to and because somewhere under the pride I think I was saving them instead for the day I could hand them to him myself.

Pastor Hale at Vinje Lutheran knew about the drawer. He is about the only one in this town I ever told the whole of it to, Gene’s funeral and the fight both, because he sat with me the week after Danny left and did not once tell me what I should have done different. He has asked me every year around Advent, gentle, not pushing, whether I have heard anything. Every year I have told him no. This past November he told me something instead of asking me something, which was new, and I did not think much of it at the time. He said he had run into a young man at the tractor supply over in Rochester back in October who looked enough like Gene Odegaard around the eyes that he had to introduce himself, and the young man had gone quiet and then asked, careful, whether the plate was still set.