The Chair I Kept Empty For My Son

I could not answer him right away. My throat had closed up the way it does sometimes in church during the final hymn, and I just nodded, and that was when he crossed the kitchen in about four steps and put his arms around me the way he used to when he was small enough that I could still pick him up off the ground, except now it was the other way, now it was him near about lifting me.

“I am sorry,” he said into my shoulder. “Mom, I am so sorry. For all of it.”

“I am sorry too,” I said. “I said a thing to you I have hated myself for every day since.”

He pulled back enough to look at me, and his eyes were Gene’s eyes exactly, wet now the way I never once saw Gene’s go even at his own father’s funeral. “I know you didn’t mean it,” he said.

“I meant it for about four seconds,” I told him, because eleven years teaches a woman that half an apology is worse than none. “And then I spent eleven years knowing I didn’t.”

**

We stood in that kitchen a long while before either of us thought to go out and bring Carrie and the boy in out of the cold. His name is Wyatt. He is eight years old, missing his two front teeth, and he has his grandfather’s exact stubborn chin, which I noticed the second he stepped into the light of the kitchen and which near about put me on the floor a second time that evening.

Over chicken that had gone a little cold and nobody minded, Danny told it the way he could tell it now, thirty-five instead of twenty-four, with some distance between himself and the boy who walked out that door. He had gone to Rochester angry and stayed angry longer than he was proud of. He had taken work at a farm implement dealer, found he was good at it, worked his way up to service manager over the years, met Carrie at a church supper he only went to because a buddy dragged him, and married her four years ago. Wyatt came two years after that. He had thought, more than once over those years, about calling. Pride is a strange animal, he said, looking right at me when he said it, because I know exactly where I got mine.

What finally brought him was not one thing. It was Wyatt, mostly. A few months back the boy had found an old photograph in a box, Danny at about ten standing next to his father in front of this very barn, and had asked who the man was and where the farm was and whether he had a grandma too. Danny had not known how to answer that honestly without it leading somewhere he was not ready to go. And then in October, at the tractor supply in Rochester, a man introduced himself as Pastor Hale from a church outside Vinje and said four words that Danny repeated to me across this table with his voice gone rough again: “Your mother still sets it.”