The Window Seat Ray Saved for Me

That same Friday I did the one thing in that week that was entirely my own idea. I carried the Florsheim shoebox over to Woody Oakes’s house and put it in his hands.

“Read what you think the room can stand,” I said.

And people I hadn’t seen in years began to arrive at my door. Customers. Ray had fixed their mowers for forty years, and some of them were sixty and some of them were ninety, and they brought casseroles, which I had been warned about, but they also brought stories.

A farmer in a seed cap stood on my porch for ten minutes turning his hat around and around and then said, “Your husband never sent a bill to my mother. Not once. I found out after she passed.” And he left a pie plate on the railing and went away.

I sat in the swing that night with eleven pie plates and a roast pan lined up on the porch rail, and I understood what Woody had been asking.

He had not asked how many people the depot would hold. He had asked how many people loved Ray.

Tim came on Friday evening.

He sat on the step below my swing with his co-op cap in his hands. He is a big man, shy, with Ray’s ears. He had been keeping himself away all week. Back in April he had known the other two were talking about using the tickets, and he had said nothing, and he did not know how to say that to me.

“They didn’t ask me to go,” he said. “I want you to know that, Mom. If they had, I would’ve said no. But I knew, and I didn’t say it.”

“I know.”

“I should have called you. When Kevin said in April they were looking at it. He said it was all handled, and I…” He stopped. “I didn’t want to make trouble.”

“Trouble was already here, Tim. Somebody just had to look at it.”

He wiped his face with the cap.

Then I asked him for one thing. “Kevin and Dana are coming back Tuesday. I would like you to tell them the time of the supper and the place. That’s all. If they ask what it is, tell them it’s my anniversary. Don’t say anything else.”

“Mom. They’ll be mortified.”

“Will they?” I said. “I don’t know. I would like to find out.”

The children came home on Tuesday, June 10th.

They stopped by the house on Wednesday afternoon with a plastic bag of souvenirs. A magnet shaped like a bear. A postcard of the lodge. Dana had bought me a little carved wooden train.

They were sunburned and cheerful, and I could see them waiting for me to say something about it. I think they had rehearsed their faces in the car.

I made coffee. I said the mountains must have been something. I asked whether the train had been on time.

Kevin looked at me over his cup with a cautious sort of hope. “Mom, we’re sorry about how it went. We should’ve told you. But we think Dad would’ve been…”

“Tim tells me you’re coming Saturday,” I said.

He blinked. “To the… the depot. Yes. Tim said it was a supper.”

“At five,” I said. “Wear something nice.”

Dana put the carved train down on my table and turned it a quarter turn, then straightened it back. She looked at me the way she had when she was a girl and had broken something.