The Board Amos Never Owned Up To

The Ninth Morning

On Thursday the twenty-second I came into the store, and she was already in the chair, and she lifted her hand as I walked past, and the hand was steady.

It was not anything she said. It was her hand. She picked up the first red piece with a certainty that I had not seen in nine days, and I understood sitting down that she did not need to be handled any more. And I understood something else, which was Maynard’s voice in that front room. Play her straight. Play her like me.

So I did. I set a trap on the left with a piece I knew she would pass over, because she was watching the right, and I let her think she had caught me, and when she took the bait I came back with a double jump that made a noise on the board that echoed in the whole back of the store. I crowned a king. I looked up.

And she laughed.

It was not a polite laugh. It was a whole-body laugh, bent over with her hand on her coat, and Glenda came running from the paint counter, and Alvin dropped his paper. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and said, “Thank you, Amos. That one I had to earn.”

I knew then that she had known. All those mornings. She had been sitting there letting me be kind, because she understood a man doing a hard thing the only way he could, and she had waited until I was ready to stop. I turned red to the collar. I started to speak. I had nearly all of it in my mouth: Maynard asked me to, I could not bear to take them from you, forgive me.

And I stopped, because she was smiling, and she was not asking, and it was not the sort of thing that needed to be said at that table in front of everyone. I put the king down. She moved her piece.

I have never explained it. She has never asked. This is the explanation, and it is the first time I have told it. Vesta, if you are reading this, and I expect you are, that is what it was.

The Cushion

It took Clell until Wednesday the fourth.

He had not come in all the week of the second. He told me later that he parked behind the store on Monday and sat in his truck for forty minutes with the engine running and then drove home. On Tuesday he drove past. I did not push him. But Tuesday afternoon I stopped by his shed and left a red and gray plaid seat cushion from my truck on the workbench, with nothing said. I do not know what I thought. I thought a woman in that chair might like something soft.

On Wednesday morning, when I came in at six forty, the cushion was on Maynard’s chair, and Clell Sykes was standing by the stove with his cap in both hands, looking as though he had been standing there for an hour. He had.

Vesta came in at ten till seven. She said, “Good morning, Clell.” And he said it, the whole of it, in his plain, flat voice, to her face. “Rule at this table is nobody asks. So I am not asking you anything. I am telling you I was wrong.” He told her about Terry. He said it in about four sentences, as if he were reading a bill of lading, and he said it looking at her.

She said she would never tip her head at him. And I watched the thing I had been afraid of for three weeks simply not happen. She did not cry. He did not cry. She said, “Sit. That is a good cushion,” and he sat down on the stool by the stove, and Alvin, who is a better man than he lets on, said, “Well, now that’s settled,” and went back to his paper.

I looked at Vesta, and she looked at me over the cushion, and I understood that this woman did not need anybody to pull out any chair. She had pulled it out herself and had spent a month showing a room of grown men how a person sits down.