Twelve Chairs and a Desk

Patti Vogt called me at school during my planning period on a Tuesday, which she never does, because she knows I keep my phone in my desk drawer while thirty sophomores run sewing machines.

“Honey,” she said, and I could hear her turn signal ticking in the background. “I just stopped by your house to drop off the extra chairs. Did you know you aren’t hosting supper club this year?”

I was standing alone at the front of my classroom holding a seam ripper. I set it down on the cutting mat very carefully, the way you set down something you might otherwise throw.

“I’m hosting,” I said. “March is mine. March has been mine for nineteen years, Patti. You know that better than anybody. You were there the first one.”

“Well, Sierra met me at the door,” Patti said. “She told me you can’t host because that room is her office now, and we’ll need to find somewhere else. She wasn’t rude about it, exactly. She just didn’t move out of the doorway.”

I did not say anything for long enough that Patti said my name twice.

Out the classroom window the March sky over the football field was the color of dishwater, and somebody’s pickup was idling in the bus loop.

“I’ll call you tonight,” I finally said. “Don’t tell the girls anything yet. Please. Just give me until tonight.”

“I won’t say a word,” Patti said. “But Denise, the chairs are still in my trunk. I didn’t know what else to do with them. I just sat there in your driveway like a fool.”

How a month turns into eight

My name is Denise Hartung. I am fifty-two years old, and I have taught family and consumer science at the high school in our little town in central Ohio for twenty-six years. Most people still call it home ec.

I teach teenagers how to read a pattern, how to balance a checkbook, how to make a white sauce that does not lump.

I have taught three generations of some families how to sew on a button. I love it more than I can say.

My husband, Mark, is a road foreman for the county engineer. He is fifty-five, he has a bad knee and a good heart, and he has spent every spring of our marriage cussing at frost heaves and potholes on roads nobody else will ever think about.

We have one son, Tyler. He is twenty-five. Last July the parts plant where he worked, the one over toward Marysville that made trim pieces for the car plants, cut a whole shift. Tyler’s name was on the list.

He called me on a Sunday night. He said, “Mom, can I come home for a month? Just till I find something. One month, I promise.”

I could hear in his voice what it cost him to ask.

I said yes before he finished the sentence. Any mother would have.

Then he said, “And Sierra too. Her lease is up and she can’t swing it alone.” I had met Sierra exactly twice, both times at Christmas.

Sierra Mott was twenty-four, small and quiet, with blonde hair she wore piled up in a messy bun. She did not talk much.

When she did, she looked at the table instead of at you. I took it for shyness, or maybe for not liking us.

They moved into Tyler’s old room upstairs, the one with the glow-in-the-dark stars still on the ceiling.

Sierra got on at the Dollar General in town, about thirty hours a week. Tyler put in applications everywhere and slept until ten.

August went by. Then school started, and football season, and the fair. Then Thanksgiving, which Sierra spent mostly in the upstairs bathroom with the fan running.

Then Christmas. Then the new year, and nobody said the word “month” anymore.

I want to be fair to my son. He did look for work. He did a few weeks of day labor on a roofing crew until it got too cold.

But he was sleeping in his boyhood bed at twenty-five, and I could see it sinking into him like water into a basement wall.