Five Plates and a Folding Chair

We ate until we hurt. Around seven we put the leftovers back out for seconds, and we talked about the house we rented junior year in Vermillion with the furnace that only worked if you kicked it.

We talked about Kat’s patients and Jess’s terrible boss and Ron’s fantasy football texts to Jess’s mom.

Around five I took a paper plate covered in foil across the hall to Mr. Hanson. He opened the door in his cardigan, looked at it, and said, “Gravy on the side. You’re a good girl.”

Then he gave me a dollar, which he has done since I moved in, and which I have never once been able to refuse.

When I came back, the girls had cleared what they could and were sitting with their feet up on each other’s chairs, too full to move.

I put the lamp on in the corner. The light went soft and gold across the table and the turkey and the dirty dishes.

I was happy. I want to say that clearly. I had expected to feel the hole where my family should have been all day, and I did feel it, a little, around the edges.

But mostly I was just happy, with my people around my little table, in my own place.

Somewhere in there my phone buzzed. A text from Lorna’s sister, Pam, a picture of the table at Dad’s house. Lorna’s good china, the turkey, Pam’s husband carving.

Dad was at the end of the table. He was not smiling for the picture. He was looking at something off to the side.

I put the phone face down. I did not want to think about it.

Jess was telling a story about a dentist who flirted with her during a root canal, and I wanted to be there for that.

At twenty after seven, somebody knocked on my door.

We all looked at each other. Jess whispered, “Is that a neighbor?” Kat said, “Maybe Mr. Hanson wants more pie.”

I was standing at the counter with the gravy boat in my hand, about to put the last of it in a container.

I set down the gravy boat and wiped my hands on a towel and went to the door in my cream sweater and my socks. I opened it.

Dad stood in the hallway in his brown jacket. He had a pumpkin pie in one hand, the kind with the crimped edge that Lorna makes.

In the other hand he had a folding chair, the one that lives in his garage.

My stairs are not easy. Two flights, and the second one turns.

He had climbed them with a pie in one hand and a chair in the other, and his chest was going up and down a little faster than I liked.

“Dad,” I said. “What are you doing? Your heart.”

“My heart’s fine,” he said. “Got a whole new one, practically. Doctor says stairs are good for it.”

He looked past me at the table, at the turkey, at three young women he had never really met, frozen in their chairs.

Then he looked at me and smoothed down his gray mustache, which is what he does before he says something that matters.

“Heard there was a Thanksgiving up here,” he said. “Figured you might be short a chair. And Lorna made two pies, and nobody at our place can eat two pies.”