The Chair We Saved for Arlene

“Mom, why do the cousins get the real plates?” Lainey asked me that with a mouthful of stuffing, sitting on a metal folding chair in her grandmother’s garage, two feet from the chest freezer.

She was four years old. She had a paper plate on her lap because the card table was too small for all five of us, and her cousins were laughing through the wall in the dining room.

I looked at Tony. He was sitting on an upside-down five-gallon bucket with his plate on his knees, the way he had sat every Thanksgiving for eleven years, and he looked back at me and set his fork down.

“Because there’s more of them,” Grace said. She was ten that year, and she said it fast and flat, the way you say a thing you have already decided not to cry about. I loved her for it and it broke my heart.

The freezer kicked on and hummed. The little space heater Tony had carried out from the porch ticked and glowed orange by Wyatt’s boots.

The garage smelled like cold concrete and the oil stain under where Arlene parked her Buick.

Through the door to the kitchen I could hear my mother-in-law laughing. Arlene had a good laugh, a big generous one, and she used it on everybody in that house except me.

“Eat your turkey, sweetheart,” I told Lainey. “It’s the same turkey they have. Grandma made it all at once.”

That was true, and it was the best I could do. I did not have an answer for that question that a four-year-old should ever hear.

I married Tony Schlegel fourteen years ago in St. Wenceslaus in Wahoo, Nebraska, where I grew up.

I was twenty-five and working at the county extension office, and he came in one afternoon to ask about a soil test.

He farmed with his dad and his two brothers eight miles north of town, corn and soybeans and a little cow-calf herd they ran on the creek ground.

He had big hands, a slow smile, and a way of listening like you were the only radio station he could get.

His mother did not come to the wedding Mass. She came to the dance afterward at the Legion hall, stayed one hour, and told my mother the ham was dry. My mother, God rest her, just smiled and offered her more.

I knew the reason, because it was not much of a secret. The Schlegels were Lutheran, Zion Lutheran out on the county road, and I was Catholic.

On top of that, I was from town, and town girls did not know anything.

The bigger reason had a name. Julie Hanson lived on the next farm down the road, and since the two of them were in diapers, Arlene had planned on Tony marrying her and putting the two quarters together.

Julie married a seed salesman from Fremont and moved to Lincoln, and as far as I know she is very happy.

Arlene never forgave me for it, which never made sense, because I did not even know Julie Hanson existed until after the engagement.

The first two Thanksgivings we ate in the dining room like everybody else.

Arlene put me at the far corner by the swinging door, and I got up a lot to refill things, and I told myself that was what new daughters-in-law did.