Somewhere between the roast and the pie she put her hand on the table, palm up, by the salt shaker, a little way across, the way you leave a gate unlatched. I looked at it for what felt like a quarter of an hour. Then I put my hand next to hers, and then on hers. It was warm, a little dry, and it held on better than I expected.
I am seventy-four years old. I do not know what you call what we have. I know I held a woman’s hand across a kitchen table for forty minutes and neither of us said a word, and the light came on over the sink, and nobody in the world was tipping his head.
At the door, in my coat, I said, “Same time tomorrow?”
She told me seven o’clock sharp, in her own chair, and that I had better bring my best game, because she was not going to be gentle.
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“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and went down her steps in the dark, and I believe I was singing.
Monday
I am writing this on Monday morning, the ninth of November, at a quarter to six, in the back of Ulrich Hardware with the stove just lit. Glenda gave me a key in August. The board is on the table, back from the kitchen, wiped down with oil, and I turned it over a while ago to look at the underside, which I have been doing all morning like a man checking a stove he has already checked.
There are three groups of marks now. Maynard’s on the left, finished, and the last one tilts. Mine on the right, four ahead, though I do not much care. And in the middle, in a pencil box a man drew in July, in the hand of the woman who is coming through that side door in an hour, one slash from a kitchen table on Sunday night. It is the cleanest mark on the board.
Last night, after I drove home, I sat in my own kitchen for a while with the light off. And I said out loud to the room, to nobody and to somebody, “I did it, Maynard. I played her straight.”
I thought I heard the chair rock a little to the left. I know it was the furnace.
I have set the pieces out. Red on her side, black on mine, twelve and twelve, in rows. This time I did not do it out of habit. I did it for the woman who will be sitting there. I pulled out the ladder-back chair a foot and a half, the way you pull a chair for a woman, and I put the red cushion on it, and I laid the pencil beside the board. It is not Maynard’s pencil anymore. It is hers.
It is ten to seven. Alvin has come in and said, “Well?” and I have said, “Well.” Clell has set his cap on the nail. Glenda is pouring the coffee.
I hear the side door.