One More Plate at Sunday Dinner

Nobody said anything. Colton looked up at Noah, who is six foot three, and his mouth fell open just a little. Then he held out the drawing with both hands, without a word.

Noah crouched down so they were eye to eye. He took the drawing and looked at it for a long time, longer than you would look at a stick figure drawing unless you meant it. “That’s pretty good,” he said. “Is that me?”

Colton nodded.

“Who’s the little guy?”

“Me,” Colton said.

Noah nodded slowly. “Well,” he said. “We better get you throwing, then.” He stood up and folded the drawing very carefully and put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap over it.

I don’t think he even knew he was doing it the same way his father does. I knew.

Dad and Mom came in the back door a few minutes later, Mom fussing about whether her rolls had gotten cold in the car.

Dad shook Colton’s hand like a grown man’s. “Walt,” he said. “Everybody calls me Walt.”

Colton looked at Dad’s hand, which is the size of a dinner plate and has a scar across the back from a cornpicker in 1979.

“Okay, Walt,” he said, very seriously, and Dad’s mouth twitched, and he had to go wash his hands at the kitchen sink for longer than anybody needs to wash their hands.

We sat down to eat at one. I had put Colton between Maddie and Noah. I did it on purpose.

I wasn’t sure Maddie would forgive me for it, but I wanted him between the two oldest, the two who remembered the most, because I thought if it was going to work at all, it would have to work with them.

Dad was still at the kitchen sink, Mom was hunting for the butter dish, and Sam was upstairs finding a clean shirt, so for a minute it was only the three of them at the table.

The chicken was on the platter, and the mashed potatoes were in the old flowered bowl with the chip on the rim that I have never been able to throw out.

I went to the kitchen for the rolls and came back to set the basket down.

That was when I saw it. Noah had picked up the bowl of green beans and was passing it to Colton, holding it low so the little boy could reach it, and Colton was holding it with both hands and looking up at him.

And on the other side of him, Maddie sat watching to make sure he had it, without a word.

The sun was coming across the table in that long bright strip, and it lit up the top of Colton’s buzz cut and the edge of Maddie’s braid, and I stood there with my hand still on the basket of rolls and couldn’t move.

Then Dad came in and took the head of the table, Mom sat beside him, and Sam dropped into the chair across. I sat at the foot nearest the kitchen.

Dad said the short grace. At the end he added, “And thank you for the company,” and his voice caught on the word.

Colton took a spoonful of green beans and a big spoonful of potatoes and then looked at the gravy, and then at Maddie, and said, quietly, like it was a secret, “I don’t like it touching my meat.”

Maddie looked at him for a second. Then she took his plate and put a careful little dam of mashed potatoes between the chicken and the green beans, and poured the gravy only on the potatoes, and slid the plate back in front of him. “There,” she said. “Fortress.”