They Left The Check On My Empty Plate

My parents had already scraped their plates clean by the time I walked into the Elmwood Supper Club. My mother looked up from her coffee, smiled that soft, practiced smile, and said, “Oh good, you made it. You can get the check, can’t you, Colleen?” My sister Sharon laughed into her wine and added, “Still slow on the uptake, aren’t you.” That was the moment I understood I had been invited for seven o’clock so that I would arrive exactly when their meal was over.

Then I asked the waitress to send Hank out from the kitchen, and every color drained out of my mother’s face.

The empty seat with the bill on it

The Elmwood sits out on Route 9, halfway between our town and the county seat, a low brick building with a green awning and a gravel lot that floods every spring. It has been there since before I was born. My grandfather used to take my grandmother there on their anniversary, and my parents kept up the tradition after them, forty-one years of it now. Relish trays and warm rolls, prime rib on Saturdays, a little bar in the front where the same men have been sitting on the same stools since the Carter administration. It is not fancy. In our part of the world it is as fancy as things get, and that is a different thing entirely.

I had driven forty minutes to be there. My meeting at the co-op had run long, a grain contract that would not close itself, and I had texted the family at 6:40 to say I would be about fifteen minutes behind. I got there at 7:18. Not late by any reasonable measure. Late enough, apparently.

They had taken the big round table in the back, the one by the window that looks out on the cornfield. My father, Roy, sat with his back to the wall the way he always does, a toothpick already working in the corner of his mouth. My mother, Faye, had her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and her lipstick had left a faint pink crescent on the rim of her coffee cup. Sharon was there with her husband Dale, both of them leaned back and loose the way people get when they have eaten well and paid nothing.

There was one empty chair. Mine. And in front of it, exactly where a plate should have been, sat the black vinyl check folder.

Not off to the side. Not in the middle of the table where a check usually lands. Directly in front of the seat they had saved for me, squared up neat, as if the check were the only reason my name had made it onto the reservation.

The tablecloth around it told the whole story. Crumbs. A ring where a water glass had sweated through. Balled-up napkins. Forks and knives already crossed on empty plates the way you leave them when you are done. A dessert dish with a smear of what looked like their bread pudding. The relish tray in the middle was picked down to the olive juice and two sad radishes. Even the roll basket was empty, and Hank’s wife bakes those rolls fresh every afternoon.

I stood there in my work clothes with a gift bag hanging from my hand.

“Happy anniversary,” I said. I was a little out of breath from crossing the lot.

Nobody stood up. Nobody slid a chair out. Nobody said they were glad I had made it after all.

My father glanced at his watch like I had walked in on the middle of something.

“Well, look who finally showed,” he said.