The Chairs
At a quarter to one, the cars started coming up the hill.
Some of them had already been to our house. Kurt told me later that he stood out in our driveway in his coat for an hour with his coffee, and every time a car slowed down he walked out and said, “It’s at Renae’s this year. Up the hill.”
Aunt Marlene had driven all the way from Springfield and hadn’t read her phone once since Camdenton.
She rolled her window down and said, “Renae’s? In her house? Well, it’s about time,” and turned around in our yard.
Dale came first, in his pickup with the four church tables in the bed.
He came in through the front door stamping snow off his boots, saw the empty living room, and stopped dead.
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He’s a big man, Dale. He farms out by Olean and he coaches junior high wrestling, and I have never seen him at a loss for words.
He looked at the bare walls. He looked at Renae standing in the archway in her black dress, with her arms still crossed.
And then he didn’t say one word about any of it. He just took his gloves off and said, “Renae, honey, where do you want these tables?”
His two boys, Dale’s boys, are sixteen and nineteen. Their cousins came in right behind them. Six or seven of them, Kurt’s young cousins, all boots and coats and cold red ears.
Somebody said, “We’re short on chairs.” And Renae, very quietly, said, “There’s folding chairs in the basement. From when Mom did the bazaar.”
I’ll never forget it. Those boys went down the basement stairs two at a time, and they came back up with folding chairs, two in each hand, then went back down for more.
Nobody told them to. Nobody made a joke. They set up every chair.
They carried them up and set them around the church tables in the living room, where the couch used to be.
Then the youngest one, Dale’s sixteen year old, went back down one more time and came back with an old box of Christmas lights.
He didn’t ask anybody. He just strung them along the mantel, where the pictures used to sit, and plugged them in.
They were the big old colored bulbs, the kind nobody makes anymore. Half of them worked.
Renae had to go stand in the kitchen for a minute after that. I went with her. Neither of us said anything.
I just handed her a dish towel to wipe her eyes, and she gave it back to me with mascara on it.