The Neighbors Who Filled My Kitchen Table

Thursday

Opal came at 8:40, not seven, which is when she comes. She came through the back door in her church dress, the navy one with the white collar, and she had put on her good pearl earrings.

“You’re early,” I said.

“I’m dressed,” she said.

She stood in the middle of my kitchen, small and straight, an old farm wife with her hands folded.

“If they’re going to ask about you, Irene, I want to look like someone worth believing.”

I turned to the stove and fussed with the coffeepot, because I could not look at her face just yet.

Evelyn came across the road at 8:50 carrying a folding chair, though I own six kitchen chairs. “In case,” she said, and set it by the window like she was saving a seat at a ball game. Nora pulled in at 8:55 in her own pickup, with the beagle riding in the passenger seat.

“Isn’t Thursday your morning at the nursing home?”

“I moved my visits. In fourteen years I never moved one.”

I poured four cups. I had baked an apple pie the night before and put out the good plates with the wheat pattern.

“This isn’t a party,” Evelyn said.

“No,” I said. “It’s a table. A table is where you go to be known.”

At nine o’clock exactly, a gray state car turned in at the end of my lane.

He walked up the gravel with a clipboard. Middle fifties, windbreaker, state lanyard, tired kind eyes. He looked at the grab bar I had put up on the back step myself last winter, with a drill.

I opened the door before he knocked.

“Mrs. Halvorsen? Wes Whitaker.”

“Come in, Mr. Whitaker. Coffee’s hot.”

He stopped in my kitchen doorway and took in the scene. Three women at a table, four cups, a pie with a slice gone, a folding chair against the wall.

“I take it these are the someone I said I’d have with me,” I said.

“I see that.” He almost smiled. “I’ll need to speak with you alone first. Then, if you give permission, with each of them, one at a time.”

“Of course.” I turned to my guests. “Go on in the front room, ladies.”

They went, Opal last, giving me one look over her shoulder like a girl being sent into a recital.