The Lift Chair That Came Home

The folding chair

Sunday morning Brenda did not come to explain.

I had told myself she would, and I had worn my navy dress and my good shoes, and I had set the cups out the night before. Eight o’clock came and went, and nine, and I called Mr. Mabry and asked if the van had room.

Derby United Methodist holds about sixty on a good Sunday, and after service the Women’s Circle puts out ham and pie in the fellowship hall under the sanctuary. Thelma Haas had brought a ham, because Thelma will bring a ham at the drop of a hat.

I carried my plate to a table and sat down on one of those gray metal folding chairs, the kind with no arms and a seat about as high as a fruit crate. I sat down carefully, the way I have learned to.

It was a mistake. I know that before the ham was cold.

After the dishes were cleared and the men had gone out to stand in the lot and talk about the weather, the room emptied around me. I sat with my hands flat on my knees. I tried to rock forward once. My hip said no. I tried again and it said no louder.

I sat there another twenty minutes and nobody saw, or I thought nobody saw. I counted the ceiling tiles. There are ninety-six.

“Millie,” said Thelma Haas.

She had come back for her ham pan. Thelma is eighty-one, with hands like a field hand and a mind like a steel trap, and she was Gene’s second cousin on the Haas side and my friend for fifty years.

She looked at me. She looked at my hands, which were white across the knuckles where I had been gripping my own knees. She looked at the chair.

“I’m resting,” I said.

“Of course you are,” said Thelma. She set the ham pan down on the table, and without a word she walked around behind me and put her arms under mine, and said, “On three.”

She counted. I pushed. We stood.

She kept hold of my elbow after I had the walker. “Where’s your chair, Millie?” she said, low, so nobody in the kitchen would hear. “I brought you the Circle’s cards in January and found you in that lift chair. You looked like a queen in it.”

I told her. I told her the way I have told you, with the money and the card, and the note under the sugar bowl, and I did not say one unkind word about Brenda. That was a point of honor.

When I finished, Thelma’s mouth was a straight line.

“Eleven hundred and twenty dollars,” she said.

“I am not asking for anything,” I said.

“Nobody asked you,” said Thelma Haas, and she picked up her ham pan and carried it out of that room like a woman carrying a sword.