The Chair We Saved for Arlene

My mom died the same winter Lainey was born. She had cancer that went fast, and my dad, Vince Barta, sat beside her bed at the hospital in Wahoo for eleven days straight and only went home to shower.

Dad drove a truck for thirty-four years, mostly a grain route and later a long haul for a cattle feed outfit out of Columbus.

He is seventy now. He has a bad shoulder, and he still wears the same canvas coat he wore on the road.

After Mom died, he would not come to Thanksgiving with us. I knew why, because there was no place for him.

Arlene’s garage was cold and crowded already, and I could not bring my widowed father out there to sit by the freezer.

So every Thanksgiving, after the garage, I drove to Dad’s house in Wahoo with a foil plate.

Every year he was in his recliner with the parade replay on and a turkey TV dinner tray in the trash.

“I’m fine, Amber,” he would say. “Your mother made such a fuss. It’s just a Thursday.”

That was the year Lainey asked about the real plates. I drove to my dad’s that evening with her asleep in her car seat and that question still sitting on my chest like a sack of feed.

Dad was in his recliner. The TV dinner tray was in the trash.

I set the plate on the counter and sat down on the arm of the couch and started to cry, and I told him all of it, the whole eleven years.

He listened like he always does, with his hands folded on his stomach.

When I was done, he was quiet for a long time, and then he said, “Your mother would have set up tables in the yard and fed the whole county.”

“She would have,” I said.

“Well,” he said, and that was all, but I thought about it all the way home.

It was the following September when I finally said it out loud.

Tony was in the machine shed greasing the combine for harvest, and I brought him a thermos of coffee and stood in the big door watching him work.

Our machine shed is a sixty by one hundred steel building with a concrete floor and a sliding door wide enough to back the combine through.

Rollie built it the year Tony was born, and Tony keeps it clean enough to eat off.

“I want to host Thanksgiving,” I said. “Here. In the shed.”

Tony wiped his hands on a rag and looked at me. “Instead of Mom’s?”

“Not instead,” I said. “I’m not trying to beat her at anything. Just a door open. Anybody who has nowhere to go. Your hired men. The widowers from both our churches. My dad.”

He did not say anything for a while. He looked down the length of that shed, at the swept floor and the tool bench and the green tractor parked along the back wall, and I could see him measuring it.

“How many?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Forty? Fifty?”

He nodded slowly. “We’d have to move the combine out to the yard once we’re done with beans. The planter can go outside under a tarp. The tractor stays, there’s nowhere else to put it.”

“So you think I’m crazy,” I said.

“I think you’re your mother’s daughter,” he said. Then he went and got the push broom, and I knew that was a yes.