The Ring on Her Good Tablecloth

I came out of Marilyn’s pantry with the green bean casserole in both hands and looked for my son, and I found him in the kitchen, sitting by himself at a folding card table.

It was the old brown kind with the vinyl top and the legs that never quite lock.

Somebody had set it against the wall by the back door, with one plate, one plastic fork, and one folding chair.

Through the kitchen doorway I could see the dining room.

The lit Christmas tree in the corner. The ham on the platter. Marilyn’s white lace tablecloth, the good one, the one she only brings out twice a year.

And every chair at that big oak table had a name card on it in Marilyn’s careful cursive.

I counted them while I stood there holding the hot dish. Kristy was on one. Dylan was on none.

“Mom,” Dylan said, “it’s okay. I don’t mind.” He was already sitting, with a plate somebody had fixed for him, ham and scalloped potatoes and a roll, and his hands in his lap.

He was fifteen. He was taller than me by then, tall and thin the way boys get the year their jeans stop fitting every three months, and he was sitting with his back to the stove like a hired man waiting to be paid.

I want to tell this right, so I will tell you who everybody was before I tell you what I did.

My name is Kristy Albers. I was thirty-eight that Christmas. I am a pharmacy tech at the drugstore on the square in Holton, Kansas, and I had been one for eleven years by then.

Dylan’s father left when Dylan was four. He lives in Texas now.

He calls on birthdays most years, and he sends a check when he remembers, and I stopped counting on either one a long time ago.

So for most of Dylan’s life it had been the two of us in a rented house on the north side of Holton, with a basketball hoop on the garage and a dog named Biscuit who outlived three couches.

Then I met Brent Kowal. He came into the pharmacy with a prescription for his mother’s blood pressure pills and a smear of grease on his forehead that he did not know was there.

I told him about the grease. He thanked me, wiped it with the back of his wrist, and made it worse.

I laughed, and he laughed, and that was the start of it.

Brent was forty-one, a diesel mechanic at a truck shop on the east side of Topeka. He had been divorced six years.

He had two kids, Brynn and Wes, who lived with their mother in town and spent every other holiday with him.

He was quiet in the way some men from farm families are quiet.

He did not say much, but when he said a thing he meant it, and he showed up when he said he would.

The first time he came to our house he noticed the porch step was loose.

The next Saturday he came back with a drill and some deck screws and fixed it without being asked, and then he and Dylan shot baskets until dark.

He asked me to marry him in August, out by the machine shed on his mother’s farm north of Holton, with the sun going down over the bean field and his hands still smelling of hydraulic fluid from a tractor he had just fixed for her.