Twelve Chairs and a Desk

Why I didn’t say the obvious thing

People have asked me since why I did not just tell them both to pack their things. It would have been my right. It was my house. It was my room. I know that.

But it was my house and my son, and I was not going to throw my boy out over a can of paint.

I was not going to make him choose between his mother and the girl he had brought home.

That night in bed Mark lay on his back for a long time looking at the ceiling. Then he said, “Your call, Denny. Whatever you decide, I’ll back you either way. You know that.”

Then he told me something I already knew but had never heard him say out loud.

When he was eighteen, his own father put him out of the house with a trash bag of clothes over a dented fender.

“I slept in my truck at the grain elevator for two weeks in November,” Mark said. “I swore I would never do that to a kid of mine. I’m not saying that’s right. I’m saying that’s where I am.”

So I swallowed it. I swallowed it for three weeks. I sewed at the kitchen table on Saturdays with my mother’s old portable, the one with the bad bobbin tension, and I did not go into that room at all.

Sierra kept the door shut most evenings. I could see the light under it late at night, sometimes past one in the morning.

I assumed she was on her phone, or watching shows, or doing whatever young people do. I never knocked.

The supper club

Our supper club started in 2007, the same year I painted that room yellow.

Patti and I were standing in the kitchen of the Methodist church after a funeral dinner, scraping ham loaf into the trash, and she said we only ever saw our friends at funerals anymore.

So we fixed it. Twelve women, twelve months, first Friday of the month. Each of us hosts once a year.

The hostess makes the main dish and sets the table. Everyone else brings a side or a dessert, and nobody looks at her phone.

We have had the same rotation, with a few changes for moves and deaths, for nineteen years.

Lois Kerr has had January since the beginning because she makes the best chili in Morrow County. Patti has April. I have always had March.

Every March for nineteen years, we have eaten in my sewing room. My cutting table is an old eight-foot work table my father built for me out of oak, with a top Mark refinished.

With the chairs pushed in tight, it seats twelve.

We have done everything at that table. We have passed around baby pictures and biopsy results. We cried there the March after Jan’s husband died.

We laughed so hard one year that Marcy had to go lie down on my guest bed.

It is not a fancy club. Some of us are teachers and some of us are retired, and two of us farm with our husbands.

We are not the kind of women who make a fuss. But that table, in that room, in March, was mine.