The Chair Grandma Pulled Out for Me

The Last Plate

The last plate of the thirty-one was supposed to be mine, and there was no place at the table for it.

I know how small that sounds when I say it out loud. But I need you to see it the way I saw it standing there.

Thirty-one places were set down the length of that long table and across the two added leaves. Not one of them was for me.

My place was the little table by the kitchen window. A single plate waited there, with a scoop of green beans and the heel of the ham, the dry end piece that nobody at the table wanted. It was already going cold.

I carried the serving platters back into the kitchen. I untied the apron and I hung it over the oven door handle. I was turning toward that little window table when the whole room behind me went quiet.

Not polite quiet. The kind of quiet that makes the back of your neck know something before the rest of you does.

I turned around.

Grandma Opal was standing up.

She did it slow, both hands flat on the table, pushing herself up out of the head chair the way it takes you when you are ninety-one. Brett’s daddy half-rose to help her and she waved him off without even looking at him.

The talking stopped the way it stops when the oldest person in a room stands up without being asked to. Forks went down. A baby fussed and was hushed fast.

Then she reached over and pulled out the empty chair beside her own. The one at the head of the table, right next to her.

She stood there with one hand on the back of that chair, and she looked straight down the length of her family’s table at her own daughter-in-law.

“Lorene,” she said. Her voice was not loud, but it carried into every corner of that house. “This child set thirty-one plates on this table with her two hands.”

“She will not eat the scraps by the window in my family,” she said. “Not on the Lord’s birthday. Not in this house. Not while I am still breathing in it.”

She patted the seat of the chair with her open hand.

“Come sit by me, honey,” she said to me. “Right here. Come on, now.”

What Grandma Opal Knew

I did not move. God help me, I did not trust it.

I stood there by the oven with the warm apron strings still in my hand, and I looked at all those faces turning toward me, and I was sure it was a trap.

I was sure that if I crossed that room and sat down in that chair, it would snap shut on me. That I would be the uppity little girl who did not know her place after all.

Grandma Opal saw it on me. She has buried a husband and two of her own sons and lived through more hard Decembers than I have years. She read my fear off my face plain as snow on a fence post.

“I was nineteen years old the first Christmas I married into this family,” she said.

She said it to me, but she said it loud, for the whole table to carry home with them.

“Nineteen and sixty-one. Luther brought me up this same gravel road in a borrowed car, and his mother met me at that same kitchen door with an apron over her arm.”