The Chicken
The last Sunday in August, I roasted a chicken and said the cruelest thing of my life over the potatoes.
I had rehearsed it for a week. I want you to know that first, before anything else, because for a long time afterward I told myself it had slipped out. It had not slipped. I stood at the sink on Wednesday and said it to the window. I said it again Friday while I peeled carrots. By Sunday I had it down to one breath, and I had a plan for how to get through it, which was to start talking before Arlo could.
Arlo was at the head of the table with his plate in front of him. Trudy had cut his chicken into small pieces, the way she did every night, without being asked, and set his fork in his good hand with the handle turned toward him. She had done it for seven months. I had watched her do it perhaps two hundred times.
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I laid down my fork and folded my napkin, and I said it. Seven months of free room and board in my house. Nine hundred dollars a month starting the first, or she could find a place in town.
My house. It was not my house. The deed had read Arlo and Dorothy Weidner until 1998, and Arlo alone since. I knew it when the words left my mouth, and I kept going.
Arlo opened his mouth. Since January that has been a small journey in itself. A word forms somewhere behind his eyes, and then it travels, and you can see it traveling. I saw it start. And I said, “Arlo, I’m only being fair,” and I kept on talking until I had talked over the top of it, and by the time he got there the moment was gone.
I did that on purpose. I knew what he was going to say. I knew it the way you know the sound of your own kitchen door. So I did not let him say it. He should have been asked. That is what I took from him at that table, before I took anything from her.
Trudy looked at her father, and then at me. She said, “All right.”
That was all. No raised voice, no scene. She picked her fork back up.
I have thought about those two words every day since. I had braced for a fight, and she gave me nothing to push against, and it is a terrible thing to find out you are the sort of person who needed the fight.