The Chair We Saved for Arlene

The weather was the first gift of the day. It had been cold all week, down in the twenties at night, but that Thursday the forecast called for sunshine and fifty-four degrees, which in late November in eastern Nebraska is about as good as it gets.

Tony set up the eight long tables in three rows of two and two and four, end to end, so we had three long tables down the middle of the shed.

I covered them in white tablecloths I had borrowed from the parish hall and two neighbors.

My dad came at seven to peel potatoes. He brought his own peeler, the old one that had been my mother’s, and he sat on a folding chair in my kitchen in his canvas coat and peeled forty pounds of russets into a stock pot without saying more than ten words.

At one point I looked over and he had stopped. He was holding the peeler, looking at it, and I saw his eyes were wet.

“You all right, Dad?”

“Your mother always made me peel,” he said. “Forty-one Thanksgivings. I never once did it right.” He smiled and started peeling again.

At ten, the first cars and pickups started up the lane. The neighbors came early with their dishes wrapped in towels and their kids running ahead.

Somebody put a pan of green bean casserole in my oven without even asking, and I loved them for it.

Tom and Percy, the hired men, showed up at eleven, both of them showered and in clean jeans and pressed shirts, which I had never seen in five years.

Percy had brought a pecan pie he said was his mother’s recipe, and his hands shook a little when he handed it to me.

Leonard Kucera drove his own pickup, of course. He was in a plaid flannel shirt buttoned to the neck and a feed cap, and he went straight to the back of the shed and sat down by the green tractor and told Wyatt it was a good machine.

By a quarter to one, every seat was full and people were still coming.

Tony ran to the house for kitchen chairs, and then to the back porch for the patio chairs, and the Novak kids sat two to a chair and thought that was the best thing in the world.

I counted at one o’clock, because I could not help it. Sixty-four people.

Sixty-four people at three long tables with white tablecloths in a steel shed that smelled like turkey and rolls and, underneath it all, just faintly, diesel.

The big shed door was rolled all the way open. The sun was coming in long and yellow across the concrete, and out past the door were the brown fields, the last of the corn still standing dry and quiet, and the line of cottonwoods along the creek.

There were old men and babies and teenagers, farmers and a schoolteacher and a mechanic from the Co-op, two Lutheran widowers and a Catholic one, a Methodist family from Cedar Bluffs, and the hired men sitting right in the middle like they belonged there.

At the head of the middle table there was one chair still empty. Lainey’s card was on the plate. Grandma Arlene, with the A backward and a little brown turkey in the corner.