Five Plates and a Folding Chair

I watched his taillights go out onto Minnesota Avenue. Then I went back up the stairs to my friends, and we did the dishes together.

Five plates. Jess counted them out loud as she dried them, because she had decided the folding chair counted as a guest.

I worked the overnight shift on Friday, so I had Friday morning to myself. The girls were still asleep in a pile in the living room when my phone rang at nine. It was Lorna.

I took it out on the balcony in my coat, with the cooler from the brine still sitting there. My hands were cold. I did not know what she was going to say.

“Bailey,” she said. “Is this a good time?”

“It’s fine,” I said.

She took a breath. I could hear the radio on the windowsill, low.

“I want to tell you something, and I want you to let me get through it, because I’ve been up since four practicing it and I’ll lose my nerve.”

“Okay,” I said.

“My first Thanksgiving in that house,” she said, “your aunt Gail was there, and your mother’s aunt, and your mother’s cousin from Yankton. Your mother’s people. They’d been coming for years, and they kept coming, because of you. Which I understood. You were their girl.”

I remembered. I had not thought about it in years, but I remembered. Aunt Gail at the head of the table in Lorna’s chair. Lorna in the kitchen most of the day, refilling things.

“They called me Mitch’s new one,” she said. “For three years. Gail moved my dishes around in my own cupboards. Your mother’s aunt asked me, in front of everybody, if I planned to keep working or if I’d finally let Mitch take care of me.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“You were fourteen. You weren’t supposed to know.” She was quiet for a second.

“When they finally stopped coming, I told myself that house was going to feel like mine. Just us. Just family. I said it so long I stopped hearing what it meant.”

“Lorna,” I said.

“Let me finish. When you called about your friends, all I heard was strangers at my table again. People I didn’t know, filling it up, me in the kitchen. And I said that awful thing about like family.”

She took a breath. “And then your dad took the pie and the chair and walked out the door at seven o’clock on Thanksgiving, and Pam asked me where he was going, and I had to say it out loud.”

She stopped. I heard her blow her nose.

“I sat at that table with my sister’s husband talking about his boat,” she said, “and I thought, that girl paid for this table. Twelve thousand dollars. And she never once said a word about it to me. Not on Sunday. Not ever. And I’d have said it, if I were her.”

I did not know what to say to that, so I did not say anything. The wind came across the balcony. Down in the lot, somebody was scraping frost off a windshield.

“I was wrong,” Lorna said. “I was small, and I was wrong, and I’m sorry. Your dad came home last night and told me about the grace he said, and about that girl’s grandma, and he sat in the recliner and didn’t say one more word to me. He didn’t have to.”