The Chair We Saved for Arlene

Lainey sat next to the empty chair. She had asked to sit there. She ate her mashed potatoes and kept looking at the door.

It was a few minutes after two when Greg and Lamar walked in through the big shed door.

Each one of them was carrying a folding chair, the old brown metal kind, under one arm.

Behind them came Michelle and Tracy and all six of the cousins, and Michelle was carrying a sheet cake, and Tracy had a pumpkin pie in each hand.

The shed got a little quiet. Tony stood up. His brothers stopped just inside the door, and for a second nobody said anything.

“We heard there was pie,” Greg said. He set his folding chair down on the concrete next to the end of the middle table and opened it up. Lamar did the same thing on the other side.

“There’s pie,” Tony said. His voice was rough. “There’s a lot of pie.”

Michelle came over to me with the sheet cake. She is a careful person, an ER nurse who never says anything she has not thought about twice, and she set the cake on the counter and looked me right in the eye.

“I’m sorry, Amber,” she said quietly. “Eleven years. I should have said something the first year. I knew it was wrong and I sat there and ate my dinner.”

I did not know what to say. I had not expected that, not from her, and it went straight through me.

“You’re here now,” I said. “Go get some pie before Leonard eats it all.”

Tracy did not say anything. She just hugged me, with her arms still smelling like her own kitchen, and held on a little longer than she needed to.

The cousins went straight to my kids. Inside of five minutes, all nine of them were out the big door and running across the yard in the sunshine toward the hay bales, and I could hear them hollering.

Nobody asked about the dining room. Nobody said what we all knew, which was that Arlene was sitting at her own table, in her own house, with the good china and the gold rims, all by herself.

I kept watching the chair. I tried not to. I cut pie and refilled coffee and wrapped leftovers for the widowers and carried a plate out to the porch for the Novak grandpa, who was more comfortable outside, and every time I walked past, I looked at that chair.

Lainey kept walking over to check on the card. She would straighten it, or move it back an inch, and look at the open door, and then go back to her pie.

“Is she coming, Mom?” she asked me for maybe the fifth time.

I knelt down next to her. “I don’t know, honey. Grandma has her own dinner. She might be tired.”

“But Uncle Greg came,” she said. “And Uncle Lamar.”

“I know.”

“So who is she eating with?”

I did not have an answer for that one either. I kissed the top of her head and told her to go play, and she went and sat by the chair instead.

Tony came up behind me while I was drying the platter. “I went over there Monday,” he said quietly. “After you called.”