The Chair We Saved for Arlene

She did not say anything to that. The line was quiet for a long time, and then I heard the click, and I sat at my kitchen table holding the phone and feeling about two inches tall.

Tony came in for dinner at noon, and I told him. He sat down across from me and took his cap off and turned it around in his hands.

“Are we still going to Mom’s?” he asked. “The kids could do both. We could eat at eleven there and come back.”

I had thought about that, and I shook my head. “I’m not taking our kids back to that garage, Tony. Not this year. I can’t. If she wants us, she knows where we’ll be.”

He nodded. He did not argue, but he went out that afternoon and drove over to his mother’s, and he did not tell me what was said, and I did not ask.

Tuesday and Wednesday were a blur of flour and onions. My kitchen smelled like sage and butter for two days straight, and every surface had a pan on it.

Grace took charge of the dinner rolls. She was eleven by then, and she kneaded dough at my counter with her sleeves pushed up and her tongue between her teeth, and she made more than two hundred rolls and froze them on cookie sheets.

Wyatt and Tony pulled the combine out to the yard under a tarp on Tuesday morning, after the last of the beans were hauled to the elevator in Wahoo. The last of the corn still stood out back, waiting on a dry week.

Then they pressure washed the shed floor and squeegeed the water out the big door.

Lainey made the place cards. That was her job, and she took it very seriously.

She sat at the kitchen table with a box of markers and a stack of index cards I had folded in half.

She could not write most of the names, so I spelled them out letter by letter, and she copied them in her careful five-year-old printing. Tom. Percy. Leonard. Grandpa Vince.

Then she held up a card and said, “Can I do one for Grandma Arlene?”

I stopped stirring the gravy base. I did not know what to say to her.

I did not know whether Arlene would come, and I did not want my daughter to make a card for a chair that would sit empty while she watched.

“Grandma might not come, honey,” I said. “She’s having her own dinner.”

“I know,” Lainey said. “But what if she does? Then she won’t have a chair.”

That stopped me. I thought about eleven years of cards I had never been given, and the chair at the corner by the swinging door, and the bucket Tony sat on, and I looked at my youngest daughter holding up an index card.

“You’re right,” I said. “Spell it G-R-A-N-D-M-A.”

She wrote it out, Grandma Arlene, with the A in Arlene backward. She drew a little turkey in the corner, and she put the card in the pile with all the rest.

I was up at four. Tony was up at four-thirty, and we went out to the shed in the dark with our coffee, and by six all five roasters were plugged in and the turkeys were in, and the sky was going pink over the Wahoo road.