The Coffee Table That Came to My Porch

The terms

Alton waited until the others had gone quiet. He has always been the kind of man who waits for it.

“I’d like to ask you something, Ervin, and I’d like you to answer it for real.”

“All right.”

“We’d like to do this here. At six, out on your porch, until you say stop. Or we go back to the co-op and Dwight drives you in, whichever you’d sooner. Or both, some mornings.” He set his cap on his knee. “It is your say. If you’d rather we went home, we’ll pick up the chairs, and I’ll still call you Monday, and I’ll say coffee’s at six, and you can tell me no.”

I looked at the six of them in their folding chairs, and at Wendell in Lorraine’s.

I will tell you that my first thought was pride. I thought of six old men, with their own bad knees and their own wives waiting up, driving a nine-mile stretch of county road in the dark for the sake of one stubborn farmer, and I opened my mouth to say it was too much.

What came out was, “I have terms.”

“Name them,” Alton said.

“Nobody calls my daughter without me knowing about it. I will tell her myself.”

“Done.”

“The rocker is mine. Nobody sits in the rocker.”

“Nobody has ever wanted to,” Marvin said. “It’s got a spring that comes up through the cushion.”

“And I pour on Saturdays.”

Alton thought about it. “Saturdays, you pour.”

“Then tomorrow,” I said. “Five minutes to six. And somebody better do something about that mailbox.”

“Cody Hammond has got a bag of concrete in his truck,” said Dwight. “He has had it there since August.”

I looked at him.

“I’m only saying,” Dwight said. “It’s a coincidence.”

That was how it was settled. Nobody shook hands on it. Dwight read the second obituary, and Gene said he had known that one too.