The Twelve Chairs I Carried Home

“Mom, I think it would be better if you didn’t come Thursday.”

I had the phone pinched between my shoulder and my ear, because both my hands were inside a bread bag. It was the Sunday night before Thanksgiving, and I was doing what I have done on that night for better than forty years, which is tearing two loaves of white bread into pieces the size of my thumbnail and spreading them on cookie sheets to dry for the dressing.

“Didn’t come where?” I said.

“Here. For dinner.” My daughter Stephanie let out a breath. “Arlene’s bringing her sister’s family over from Holdrege, and Dale and his bunch are driving out from Lincoln, and she needs the big table. There just isn’t room, Mom. I counted it three times.”

Arlene was Mrs. Lindquist, her new husband’s mother. I had met her exactly twice. Once at the wedding in June, and once in the parking lot of the grocery store on Burlington, where she shook my hand like a woman being introduced to a county commissioner.

“She needs the big table,” I said.

“She’s used to a certain kind of Thanksgiving. She did it at her own house for forty-some years and this is the first one since she sold the place. Curt says it’s been hard on her. I just want it to go right.”

“How many is it?”

“Twelve. With her sister’s and Dale’s.”

“And the table seats twelve.”

“Right.”

I will say this plainly, so nobody loses track of the furniture. That table was mine. The oak table, its two leaves and all twelve chairs around it belonged to me, and had been on loan in her dining room since June.

I looked down at the bread on the cookie sheets. I had torn enough for twenty-five people. I always do.

“Who’s cooking?” I asked.

“I am.” She said it fast, the way she used to tell me she’d already done her homework. “I want to do it myself this year. Arlene’s bringing her rolls and the pies. Your turkey’s out in the garage fridge, it’s thawing fine, and I looked up the times.”

My turkey. A twenty-two pound bird I had picked out myself and carried into her garage refrigerator the Saturday before, because the plan (her plan, made in October) was that I would let myself in Thursday at six in the morning and cook the dinner in her kitchen, the way I had cooked it in mine since before she was born.

“So I’m not to cook it and I’m not to eat it,” I said.

“Mom. Don’t make it sound like that.”

“I’m not making it sound like anything. I’m trying to get it straight.”

“We’ll do something Friday, just us. I’ll bring you a plate.” Then, quieter: “Please don’t be mad. It’s one year.”

I am going to tell you the truth about that minute, because I have turned it over more than any other minute in this story. I could have argued. I had the words right there in my mouth. That is my table you are counting chairs at, Stephanie. That is my turkey. I am your mother.

But you cannot argue your way back to a table you’ve been asked to leave. The best you can do is get yourself tolerated at it. I was sixty-six years old, and I was not going to eat my Thanksgiving dinner tolerated.

“That’s fine,” I said.

“Really?”

“That’s fine, honey. You have a good dinner.”

I hung up and stood in my kitchen with a bread bag on each hand like a pair of mittens.