The Chair I Kept Empty For My Son
He read all eleven that night, start to finish, at this table, with his wife’s hand on his and his son sound asleep against my shoulder by the time he got to the last one, because an eight year old can only sit still through so much grown-up crying before the day catches up with him. I will tell you honestly I do not remember most of what was written in those cards anymore, after eleven years of writing and never sending them, the specific words have blurred some in my memory. But I remember the last line of the eleventh one, the one from this past March, because I had written it only seven months ago not knowing a single thing about Pastor Hale or a tractor supply or a boy named Wyatt asking about his grandma. It said: “Whatever happened between us, I will set your plate until one of us is in the ground. I hope it is a long time before either of us finds out which.”
Danny read that line out loud, and then he looked up at me and said, “Well, Mom. Here I am instead.”
**
We talked past midnight, longer than this old body usually lasts on a Sunday, about Gene, about the herd, about the two years they ran this place together before it all came apart. I told him I sold the last of the dairy herd myself, six years ago, to a younger family over toward Hancock who milk three hundred head and run it like a real business instead of a shrine, which was the word my son had used that I had never forgotten. I told him I put the acres into corn and soybeans just the way he had drawn it out on that legal pad all those years ago, and that the farm has been in the black every year since, and that I think about him every single time the combine goes out in the fall, because the plan that broke us apart was also the plan that saved this place.
“I should have told you that a long time ago,” I said. “That you were right. That’s its own kind of pride, not saying it.”
“I should have called you a long time before Pastor Hale had to say it for me,” he said back. “That’s its own kind of pride too.”