The Pot Roast
I did not eat all day Sunday.
At a quarter past four I put on the clean blue shirt Lila bought me for my retirement, took a loaf of bread from the Ellard bakery because you do not go to a woman’s door empty-handed, and carried the board out to the truck in the same feed sack I first brought it in. I had not planned that. It was just the sack in the truck.
I will confess I drove past her lane the first time and had to turn around in a neighbor’s drive. When I pulled into her yard the kitchen light was on, and I sat in the truck five minutes. I thought, what in the world are you doing, old man. Then I thought, he said do the rest on your own time, if she wants it. And she had made a pot roast. So I got out.
She opened the back door before I could knock. She had on a green sweater and had done something to her hair, and her face did a thing when she saw me that I had not seen on any face in seven years. I said, “I brought bread.” She said, “I see that.” We stood on the step like fools in the last of the daylight, and then she said, “Well, come in, Amos. It is cold.”
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We set the board on her kitchen table, a plain scarred oak one with a ring from a hot pot in 1988. I sat in what had been my guest chair for thirty years, and I played the way I play when nobody is watching me play, which is as hard as I can with my whole mind.
She beat me. I want that clean, in her own pencil. She walked around the trap I set on the left, sacrificed a piece on the right that I did not see until too late, and took three of mine in a row. I laughed, and it came up out of me like something that had been down a well. She laughed too, with her head tipped back, and I thought: there it is. That is what he left her with.
We had supper at six. I could not tell you what we talked about. The roast, her daughter, the new roof the school board wants. I told her about a boy who tried to cut a dado with a bread knife. I said nothing that mattered, and for two hours it was the most important conversation of my life.