The Two Chairs On The Lawn

I found out there would be no party while I was standing at my own kitchen sink with a dish towel over my shoulder.

Kay called. She is Harold’s cousin, out past Oolitic, and she has never once called just to talk. She called to say she was sorry.

“Sorry for what,” I said.

“For the party, honey. Gary told Ray it got called off. He said you and Harold were too wore out for a big fuss, and I understand that, fifty years is a lot of years, I just wanted you to know we’d have come.”

I set the towel down on the counter very slowly, the way you set a thing down when your hands have stopped being sure of themselves.

“When did he tell Ray that,” I asked.

“Oh, a couple weeks back. We figured you knew.”

I told her it was fine, that we were tired, that she was sweet to call. I do not know why I said it was fine. It is the thing you say so the other person can hang up without feeling bad, and I have been saying it my whole life.

Then I stood in the kitchen and listened to the refrigerator hum.

There had been a party. That was the thing. There had been a party for weeks, growing in the back of my mind like a garden I was not allowed to touch but got to watch. Sheryl had told me about it in July. She sat right there at my table with her coffee and said, Mom, don’t you worry about a thing, we are taking care of all of it.

Three thousand dollars

I need to tell you about the money, because that is the part that sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.

Sheryl and Gary had passed the hat. Not in a mean way, I did not think it was mean at the time. They sent word around to the family that there would be a fiftieth anniversary dinner for Harold and me in October, at the Elks lodge in Bedford, and that anyone who wanted to chip in toward the hall and the caterer could.

People gave. That is what still gets me. People who do not have it gave.

Kay and Ray put in. My brother Donald, who is on a fixed check and buys his medicine in halves, put in fifty dollars and apologized for it not being more. Harold’s nephew sent a card with two twenties folded inside and a note that said, For Uncle Harold, who taught me to back a trailer.

Three thousand dollars, Sheryl told me once, proud of it. Three thousand dollars the family had put together so their old people could have a night.

And then there was no night. And nobody had told me. And the money did not come back to anybody, because when I finally asked, weeks later, it was already gone.

But I am getting ahead of myself. That first evening I only knew what Kay had told me, which was that my son had gone around to the family and quietly closed the door on the whole thing without saying a word to me or his father.