The Two Acres Grandma Sold Us

Cody and I talked about it on the porch steps the first night, sitting on the cement with our coffee because the porch did not have a light yet.

The fixture box was just a hole with wires capped off and taped.

“I want to have your dad’s family for our first supper,” I said.

Cody was quiet. “You sure?”

“No,” I said. “But it’s our first supper in our first house, and he’s your dad, and Grandma’s coming, and it’s a table. Tables are for family. I’m not going to start this house by leaving somebody off.”

“He’s going to sit there and look at those panels the whole meal,” Cody said.

“I know,” I said. “I’m not doing it to make him look. I’m doing it because there isn’t another window. He’ll look or he won’t. That’s between him and the Lord.”

I called Gene myself, on Wednesday, so he would hear it from me and not from Cody, and not from the co-op.

I said, “Supper Sunday. Six o’clock. Bring Amy and Jeff and the girls. Grandma’s coming.”

He was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped. I could hear his television in the background and the wind against his kitchen window.

“All right,” he said finally. Then, after another long pause, “What can I bring?”

“Just you,” I said. “Just come.”

Sunday I made the chicken and noodle casserole Deb used to bring to every funeral and every wedding in our church for thirty years.

I had asked Amy for the recipe months before. I wanted to cook something of Deb’s in that kitchen.

Grandma came early, in her lavender blouse, which she wears for Easter and anniversaries and not much else.

She sat down at the corner by the window, where I had put her, and did not argue about it, which is how I knew she understood.

Amy and her husband came at a quarter to six with their two girls, eight and ten, who ran straight to the back door to see the lilac because Grandma had told them about it at church.

Gene came at six exactly. He wore a plaid shirt I had never seen, still creased from the package.

He stood in my doorway for a moment, looking at the kitchen, at the long table, at the corn crib boards Cody had sanded smooth.

“You built this,” he said to Cody. “You and those boys.”

“Mostly,” Cody said. “Kevin hung the headers.”

Gene nodded. He did not take off his jacket right away.

Then he did, and he came in, and he walked down the side of the long table, and there was only one chair left. It was the chair at the far end, with the big window right behind it.

He looked at it, and then at me. I did not say anything. I did not have to. He pulled it out and sat down in it himself.

I carried the casserole in from the stove and set it down in the middle of the long table, still steaming.

I was in the sage green sweater Cody gave me for my birthday, with my hair pulled back in a low bun because I had been cooking all day.

The light outside was going gold and long, the way it does on an October evening in Kansas, and it lit up those panels across the road like a field of dark water.