The Chair We Saved for Arlene

Then Tony’s brothers married. Greg married Michelle, a nurse from Schuyler, and Lamar married Tracy, who grew up two miles west and had shown cattle with Tony at the county fair. Both of them were Lutheran. Both of them were country.

The third year, Grace was a baby in a carrier. When we came in the back door, the dining room table was set for twelve with Arlene’s good china, the cream pattern with the gold rim, and there was a card table set up in the garage.

“It’s just easier with the baby,” Arlene said. “You’ll want to be able to get up and down. I put the heater out there.”

Tony started to say something, and I squeezed his hand. I thought it was one year.

I thought it was about the baby, and I wanted to believe the best of her, so I let it go.

It was not one year. It was eleven.

The second year at the card table, Tony asked her. He told me about it afterward, standing in our yard by the truck with his hands in his coat pockets, and I could tell it cost him something.

“I told her it wasn’t right,” he said. “I said you and the kids belong at the table same as Michelle and Tracy. I said it plain.”

“What did she say?”

“She said there wasn’t room.” He kicked at the gravel. “She said the table seats twelve and she can’t help how many grandkids there are. She said if you didn’t like it, you were welcome to stay home.”

I could have fought it. People ask me why I didn’t, and the honest answer is that I knew exactly what a fight would cost.

It would cost Tony his mother, and it would cost Tony his brothers, because they farmed every acre together.

Those three boys shared a planter and a combine and a line of credit at the bank in Wahoo.

If I made Thanksgiving a war, I made spring planting a war, and harvest, and every Sunday dinner, and every sale barn morning for the rest of our lives.

So I stopped asking. I did not stop being hurt, but I stopped asking her for room, and somewhere in the back of my mind I started thinking that someday I would just have to make room myself.

Tony never let us eat out there alone, not once in all those years.

He would fill his plate in the kitchen and walk right past the dining room and out the door, and he would turn that bucket over and sit down with us.

His mother hated it. She would come to the door and say, “Anthony, your chair is in here,” and he would say, “No, Mom, my chair is out here,” and that was all either of them ever said about it.

His dad, Rollie, was a quiet man. He never said a word against Arlene in his life, but every year after the meal he would come out to the garage with the pie server and a whole pumpkin pie and let the kids cut their own pieces as big as they wanted.

Rollie died six years ago, in April, of a heart attack in the machine shed with the planter half greased. After that, nobody came out to the garage with pie.