The Two Chairs On The Lawn

Harold at the kitchen table

Harold came in from the barn around six. He has a way of filling the back doorway, even now, even stooped the way he gets by evening. He took off his cap and hung it on the nail and looked at me, and he knew right away something was wrong, because fifty years will teach a man to read a face.

“What happened,” he said.

I told him. All of it, the way Kay said it. He sat down at the table and folded his big hands on the oilcloth and did not say anything for a long time.

Harold is not a talker. He never has been. When we were courting I did most of the talking and he did most of the listening, and I used to think I would train him into a conversation eventually. I never did. I learned instead to read the quiet. There is a quiet he keeps when he is thinking, and a quiet he keeps when he is hurt, and they are not the same quiet.

This was the hurt one.

“They kept the money,” he said finally. It was not a question.

“I don’t know that,” I said. “I only know there’s no party.”

“Eunice.” He looked up at me. “You know.”

I did. I just did not want to be the one to say it first.

Here is the thing people will want me to have done. They will want me to have called Gary right then and put it to him. They will want me to have driven to Sheryl’s and stood in her kitchen the way she had stood in mine. I know that, because later a good many people told me so.

I did not call. I want to be honest about why, because it was not because I am a saint and it was not because I was afraid.

It was because I knew how that call would go. I would ask, and there would be a reason, and the reason would have an edge to it, and before it was over I would be the one apologizing for asking. I had made that call before, over smaller things. It never once ended with me feeling like the mother in the house.

And our anniversary was that Sunday. The real one. Fifty years to the day since Pastor Reed’s father, who had the church before him, married us in that same little building out on the county road.

I did not want to spend the last week of fifty years waiting by the phone for an apology that would arrive bent. I did not want our day to be a day I spent being angry at my children. I had done enough days like that.

So I made Harold a plate, and we ate, and I did not call.