The Chair We Saved for Arlene

Nobody sat in it. Nobody asked about it. I think the whole room knew whose chair it was, because in a county like ours everybody knows everything, and half of them had heard about the garage for years.

I carried the first turkey out on my mother’s big white platter.

I had on the cream knit sweater my mother made me the Christmas before she died, and my hair was coming loose, and I did not care one bit.

When I set that turkey down, Leonard Kucera started clapping. Then everybody did. I stood there in front of sixty-four people holding a carving fork and turning red as a beet.

Tony stood up and tapped his water glass with a spoon. The shed went quiet, except for one of the Novak babies fussing and the far off sound of a pickup on the county road.

“I’d like to ask Vince to say grace,” Tony said. “If he’s willing.”

My dad had not prayed out loud in front of anybody since my mother’s funeral.

He looked at Tony, then he looked at me, and he set down his fork and stood up slowly with his hand on the back of his chair.

He took off his cap. Every man in the shed took off his cap.

He folded his hands, and he started the old Catholic grace, the one we said every night at our kitchen table when I was a girl.

“Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts,” he said, “which we are about to receive from thy bounty.” Half the room knew the words. The other half bowed their heads and waited.

Then he stopped. He just stopped, standing there with his hands folded and his head down, and I could see his shoulders shaking.

Nobody moved. The sunlight was on the white tablecloths and on my father’s gray head.

“And bless Marie,” he said, and his voice went. “Who should be here.”

That was when Leonard Kucera got up from the far end of the table, slow, with one hand on the tablecloth, and walked the whole length of the shed.

He was eighty-one years old and a widower himself, and he put his old hand on my father’s shoulder.

He did not say anything. He just stood there with his hand on my dad’s shoulder, in that plaid flannel shirt, until Dad could breathe again.

“Through Christ our Lord,” my father said. “Amen.”

“Amen,” said sixty-four people, and I had to turn around and pretend to fix the roaster so nobody would see me cry.

Tom and Percy carved. I had not asked them to. They just stood up from the middle of the table and went to the turkeys like it was a job that needed doing, and they had brought their own knives.

“A pocket knife is for baling twine,” Tom said when I looked at him. “This here is for Thanksgiving.”

He had a twelve-inch carving knife his mother had given him when he left Montana, and he had sharpened it on a stone in the shop that morning.

Percy carved two turkeys and Tom carved three, and they were done in twenty minutes, and the Novak kids stood next to them the whole time watching like it was a rodeo.

I watched my children while we ate. Grace was at the end of a table with two of the Novak girls, showing them how to make a turkey out of a dinner roll and four toothpicks. Wyatt was sitting next to Leonard Kucera asking about tractors.